Heather dewey hagborg chelsea video
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Dewey-Hagborg’s new portraits of Manning, however, are both a form of awareness raising, and a form of recognition.
After all, interpretation is precisely why Dewey-Hagborg’s installation can have so many possible faces of Chelsea distributed across different genders and races.
It was then that I realized: the centerpiece of the show is placed precisely so that when someone walks by, his or her face conveniently blends into the sea of Chelseas.
Rather, Dewey-Hagborg emphasizes the present, maintaining that technological tools can help push the boundaries of restrictive thinking, instead of just reinforcing it. Do you think you raised the questions that you wanted it to, about gender and the prison-industrial complex?
Radical Love premiered at the World Economic Forum in January of 2016, if I remember correctly.
And, simultaneously, in a kind of double gesture, to deconstruct this technology itself, to call attention to some of its shortcomings and reductions.
What was the process of removing Chelsea’s DNA from prison?
I hadn’t met Chelsea in person. There was a fantastic release of images of her in Vogue in August 2017, for example, where she is wearing a black sweater and standing against a wall.
This perception generates anxiety and panic: the paranoid obsession with order tries to reduce the horizon to repetition, belonging and identity.” Existing on that ambiguous horizon, emergent forms of technology always face the possibility of being reduced to serving a homogenous end; in this case, DNA phenotyping risks becoming a biopolitical mechanism tasked with profiling and targeting.
For the Paper portrait, Dewey-Hagborg decided to exclude the gender parameter from of the DNA visualizing process. Probably Chelsea, a series of 30 different portraits of Manning created from DNA analysis in 2017 and exhibited at Fridman Gallery, New York, is an extension of Radical Love.
Dewey-Hagborg’s portraits seek to uncover the dominant narratives surrounding who is considered eligible and worthy of representation, and who is deemed the author of their own image, while shaking off outdated notions of genetic essentialism.
But as Manning reminds us daily, the right to one’s self-image is also a necessity.
“Heather Dewey-Hagborg & Chelsea Manning: A Becoming Resemblance” is on view at Fridman Gallery, New York, through September 5, 2017.
Orit Gat is a writer living in New York whose work on contemporary art and digital culture has appeared in a variety of publications.
In an excerpt from her newly published book – Ethical Portraits – Hatty Nestor talks to Heather Dewey-Hagborg about her artwork that resists surveillance and gender binaries
While researching facial recognition techniques and uses of DNA, I emailed Heather Dewey-Hagborg, an artist whose work exposes the dangers of data collection and identity.
The shot came to stand for what she went through in the shadows of the American military prison system, away from the public eye. In a sense it’s much lighter and more playful and fun. Even if the topic addressed by this piece seems generic in comparison to the Chelsea project, it does provide a conceptual tool for addressing a specific biopolitical problem.
At the press preview, Dewey-Hagborg commented on the dangers of the reductive frameworks for identity that police, forensic scientists, and the media often employ.
We published the comic on the morning of 17 January, and then that afternoon Obama commuted her sentence. Manning was seated against a blank background wearing a feminine pantsuit and heels, her blonde hair cut in a fashionable pixie. They also demonstrate how solidarity with the incarcerated can begin with a single strand of hair.
Phone interview conducted between Hatty Nestor and Heather Dewey-Hagborg, January 2018 between New Mexico and Berlin.
Hatty Nestor: The constraints placed upon Chelsea Manning while she was in prison meant that she had little control over her identity or the distribution of her portrait.
This collaboration is now both a documented account of a specific past and a monument to agency. After her sentencing in 2013, Manning announced through her lawyers that she was female and would like to be addressed by female pronouns. It was always intended for her to see upon being free.
Excerpt taken from Ethical Portraits: In Search of Representational Justice, published by Zer0 books
A Becoming Resemblance
The guest exhibition A Becoming Resemblance by Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Chelsea Manning investigates emerging technologies of genomic identity construction and their role in our societal moment.
The centerpiece of the exhibition, Probably Chelsea, is a series of thirty 3D-printed possible portraits of Chelsea Manning, the former US intelligence analyst-turned-whistleblower who in 2013 was sentenced to 35 years of imprisonment.
The exhibition, titled A Becoming Resemblance and curated by Roddy Schrock, ultimately suggests that identities are multiple and fluid, while championing the possibilities presented by developing bio-technologies.
Walking in, the viewer is confronted by a sea of realistically rendered 3D portraits. She could not give interviews in person (though she did conduct a couple by mail) or be photographed.