Wangechi
Mutu first presented the collage, sculpture, and video that make up A Trinity at the 56^th Venice
Biennale in 2015. Encompassing Mutu’s ongoing exploration of Western, African,
and feminist identities, this suite also testifies to the artist’s passionate
concern for the global environment.

Each
work focuses on a different aspect of womanhood. Forbidden
Fruit picker is dominated by a modern-day Eve, reaching up for an apple as two snakes twist and hiss. She’s got the
whole world in her portrays a sphinxlike matriarch contemplating a hanging globe,
burnt black and wasted, while her basket-like skirt shelters an array of
figures and animals. Mutu herself acts as the protagonist of The End of carrying
All. The video traces her progress across the savannah; as
twilight falls, the basket becomes increasingly filled with consumer goods and
industrial structures: a bicycle wheel, a satellite dish, a tower, and an oil
rig. Eventually, the burden becomes too much to bear, and the woman buckles and
melts under the strain, consumed and ultimately becoming one with nature. A
volcanic eruption ripples through the earth, all is quiet, and then the journey
begins once again.