In the center of the room at New York’s Fridman Gallery are multiple faces – white, black and brown, each bearing an almost imperceptible resemblance to one another – suspended on wires from the ceiling.

The 30 portraits were created by the artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg from cheek swabs and hair clippings sent to her by Chelsea Manning. Manning sent the clippings from the Fort Leavenworth prison, where the former intelligence analyst was serving a 35-year sentence after famously leaking classified diplomatic cables through the website WikiLeaks.

The new exhibition, which opened on 2 August, is titled A Becoming Resemblance. It’s the product of two years of correspondence between Dewey-Hagborg, whose discipline combines her expertise in technology, computer science and art, and Manning, a trans woman and pioneering dissident whose sentence was commuted by Barack Obama when he had just three days left in office.

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By algorithmically analyzing DNA extracted from Manning and using it to create 30 portraits of what someone with that genomic data might look like, Dewey-Hagborg has created a trenchant, if somewhat cerebral, commentary on not only the malleability of DNA data – the many ways it can be interpreted, and the inherent determinism of those interpretations – but also identity.

Manning, who was born Bradley Edward but has spoken openly about identifying as a woman as early as adolescence, was convicted in 2013 on 20 charges, including six Espionage Act violations, computer fraud and theft. From prison, her image was repressed, so much so that there was just one photo – a granular, black-and-white selfie in which Manning, visibly uneasy, sits in a driver’s seat wearing a platinum blonde wig – with which she became associated.

In 2015, Dewey-Hagborg was coming off the massive success of her 2012 project, Stranger Visions. In it, the artist produced portraits of strangers from forensic artifacts like cigarette butts and chewing gum, extracting DNA from the detritus to conjure an image of what these folks might look like. That was when she received an email from Paper Magazine.

“They were conducting an interview with Chelsea Manning while she was in prison and they wanted some kind of portrait to accompany that article,” Dewey-Hagborg explained at a press preview of the new exhibition. “And she couldn’t be visited and she couldn’t be photographed at that time, so they reached out to Chelsea and asked if she’d be interested in having a DNA portrait made.”

The artist and her incarcerated muse became unlikely pen pals, exchanging several letters over the course of two years. They even created a comic book, Suppressed Images, illustrated by Shoili Kanungo, that envisioned a future where the president would commute Chelsea’s sentence and she’d be able to see the exhibition in person. That Obama would indeed call for Manning’s release just days after the book went public was a welcome sort of serendipity after seven brutal years at a military prison in Kansas.

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There’s also something profound and powerful about the exhibition opening now, as Donald Trump wages war on government leakers and transgender troops while finding new, tweetable ways to further inflame the stark divisions he’s been called on to mend. When asked about the peculiar timing of it all, Dewey-Hagborg said that “things happen for a reason”.

In an artist statement written on the gallery’s wall, Manning’s super-sized signature below it (the “i” in her last name dotted with a heart), called for an end to the “automatic factionalism that gender, race, sexuality, and culture have been the basis of”. On the opposite wall is her mitochondrial DNA sequence – a centipede of Cs and Gs and As, written in pencil. By including the 200 letters (or nucleotides, per the artist’s sophisticated scientific lexicon), Dewey-Hagborg hoped to illustrate how astoundingly similar, at least in biological makeup, we all are.

“What I’m hoping that people will take away from this is that our genome doesn’t care about who we are, and how open genetic data is to interpretation, how subjective it is,” said Dewey-Hagborg, whose 2007 video work, Spurious Memories, is also on display. “DNA data can tell so many different stories, so this is 30 of those stories.”

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The final piece in the exhibition, which is contained in a single room, is one page from the aforementioned graphic novella. It shows Manning, emerging, King Kong-esque, from the United States Disiplinary Barracks with a speakerphone in hand. “When they chill your speech, then they’ve won,” it reads. “So never shut up.”

“It came directly from a letter that she wrote to me,” the artist, who hails from Philadelphia, said. “I get goosebumps still talking about it.”

Manning hasn’t seen the exhibition in-person yet – as was so presciently imagined in the comic book – but when she does, she’ll be greeted in the center of the room by the masks, her own genomic simulacra congregated like hordes of protesters.

That was purposeful, too, as is everything in the exhibition, down to the height (5’2, Manning’s stature) at which her genetic haplogroups were written in pencil.

“In the past, I’ve had them on the wall but I wanted them to feel like a crowd,” Dewey-Hagborg said of the portraits. “I wanted it to feel like a mass movement that was forming with Chelsea, like the movement that was behind freeing her as well.”