US soldier Chelsea Manning was arrested in 2010 in Irak and sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking documents to WikiLeaks.
After Manning was sentenced she announced her new identity as Chelsea after a gender transition. Since imprisoned, it is not allowed to take a picture of Chelsea, so the Chicago-based artist Dewey-Hagborg reconstructed the face of Manning from her DNA.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg:
She has been imprisoned and unable to be seen or visited for the duration of her gender transition. As long as she’s been identifying as Chelsea Manning we’ve been unable to see her, so there was poetry to making visible the invisible.
She extracted the purified DNA from Manning and recreated two faces with the controversial process of “forensic DNA phenotyping”. One face is produced of DNA with the gender genome switched to neutral and the other as a women.
The faces are displayed at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
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