Humbabas Womb /
Mythologies of Fear
at Emancipation of the Living / Emancipação do Vivente Exhibition
Curated by the Museum for the Displaced
at Galeria Municipal de Almada.
Humbaba’s Womb: Mythologies of Fear draws upon the ancient guardian of the Cedar Forest to reconsider the myth of conquest from the perspective of the being declared a monster. Moving between mythology, ecological testimony, poetry, and participatory ritual, the work asks how fear produces separation—from wilderness, darkness, the feminine, Indigenous knowledge, and otherness—and makes domination appear necessary.
Rooted in Lebanon’s intersecting political and ecological crises, the installation brings this mythology into the present through footage of illegal sand extraction and raw sewage along the Lebanese coast. At its center is an egg carried against the artist’s body: a fragile womb, a threatened ecology, and the possibility of another world. Its eventual rupture confronts the audience with what is sacrificed when land becomes something to conquer rather than a living relation to protect.