Salt Lines, an exhibition by artist duo Hylozoic/Desires — Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser, travels to Jaipur following its showing at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai earlier this year.

Salt Lines excavates the largely erased from history of the Inland Customs Line: a 4,000-kilometre barrier —2,500 kilometres of which was a living hedge of plants — built by the East India Company and the British Raj to enforce a devastating colonial monopoly on salt. Also known as the Great Hedge of India, this vast border traversed the Indian subcontinent, separating the two to prevent the movement of salt. Conceived by the East India Company in the 1830s and expanded considerably under the British Raj, the Customs Line was actively patrolled, with security lookouts positioned at regular intervals along its length. At its peak in 1869, nearly 14,000 workers were employed along the line. Despite its extraordinary scale and the violence of its enforcement, the Inland Customs Line was abandoned in 1879 when the British seized control of Sambhar Lake from the princely states of Jaipur and Jodhpur, and it has since been largely erased from both memory and landscape.

Salt Lines treats this vanished border as a poetic and political space; a partition that begets a series of divisions and perforations that continue to fray, tear, and rip into our present. The exhibition connects extraction to ecology, governance to myth, and the violence of empire to the intimacies of resistance. Working at the threshold of historical records and speculative imagination, Hylozoic/Desires penetrate this porous border to remember what has been erased, and to imagine new futures of non-duality and liberation.

Salt Lines by Hylozoic/Desires
Jaipur Center for Art, Jaipur
3 July 2026 – 9 August 2026

Salt Lines is presented by Jaipur Centre for Art (JCA) in collaboration with RMZ Foundation.