Radical Love

“Pics or it didn’t happen” – whistleblower Chelsea Manning knows only too well the hard truth that underlies this maxim of the digital age. Before her gender reassignment surgery, when she still went by Bradley Manning, she leaked state secrets to WikiLeaks. Sentenced to 35 years in prison, since then she has disappeared from public view. Only a handful of people have seen her as a woman, and for the rest it is as if she doesn’t exist. In a response to this absence, artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg made two life-size 3-D portraits of Manning using forensic DNA phenotyping, a technique that approximates a person’s on the basis of their DNA. Manning herself sent hair and saliva samples. Dewey-Hagborg constructed two possible versions of Manning’s face, one more gender-neutral, the other more feminine. The portraits not only criticize phenotyping as a form of control, but also question the contemporary fixation on the visual image, and how prisoners are deprived of their humanity by keeping them invisible – as if they don’t exist.