The Porterville College Art Gallery Presents: Veiled Voices (The Least of These)
Veiled Voices (The Least of These) is an exhibition featuring reproductions of drawings by Afghan women living under Taliban rule. It will be on display at the Porterville College Art Gallery from March 5 to March 27, 2025, coinciding with Women’s History Month. The exhibition highlights the urgent struggle for women’s rights and the courage of those who continue to resist systemic oppression.
The exhibition originates from a 2022 collaboration between Porterville College professors Elisa Queenan and Elizabeth Flynn, who encountered these drawings while participating in the EPIC Faculty Fellowship at Stanford University. There, they met Afghan activist Laila Haidari, who had been working directly with women under Taliban rule to document their experiences. Together, Haidari, Queenan, and Flynn developed the idea of Afghan women creating drawings to capture their lived realities. These works—raw, immediate expressions of fear, defiance, and survival—were first exhibited at Stanford and now take on an expanded form at Porterville College.
Curated by Diran Lyons, this exhibition introduces an interactive element: each drawing is veiled beneath black fabric, compelling viewers to lift the coverings in a performative act of defiance against imposed silence. A dual-screen video installation further deepens the experience—one screen remains dark, symbolizing the suppression of women’s voices, while the other reveals the testimony of a woman speaking about the realities of life under Taliban rule. This iteration of Veiled Voices introduces a stark confrontation with the brutal realities depicted in the drawings. The images—created by Afghan women who have endured public floggings, stonings, and execution under Taliban rule—do not merely document the atrocities. They remember bodies battered for seeking education, for existing in defiance of patriarchal law.
The conceptual foundation of the exhibition also draws from Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, a work historically tied to radical abstraction and artistic reduction. Here, however, the black fabric does not represent an ending but an obstruction—one that must be actively overcome. The exhibition challenges viewers to consider the intersections of political repression, artistic censorship, and gendered violence, inviting critical reflection on the power structures that determine whose stories are seen and heard.
Veiled Voices (The Least of These) opens March 5 at the Porterville College Art Gallery and runs through March 27. For more information, contact Porterville College Art Gallery Director Theodore Lyons at theodore.lyons@portervillecollege.edu.
EVENT: Porterville College Art Show: Veiled Voices (The Least of These)
DATES OF SHOW: March 5 – 27, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: March 5, 2 - 5 pm at the Porterville College Art Gallery
GALLERY HOURS: Monday – Thursday from 12 – 4 pm