My colleagues and I traveled to the Oslo Freedom Forum to meet with a diverse group of policy makers, artists, journalists, writers, entrepreneurs, activists, hackers, and diplomats. What follows is the first of a series of conversations with some of the world’s most prominent experts on the global fight for free expression and the role that technology plays on both sides of the struggle.

Shamsia Hassani barely speaks above a whisper when she tells the story of holding her mother’s hand as the opera house crumbled around her after being bombed by the Taliban. Hassani, now 27, spent her childhood in exile in Iran, eventually returning to her native Afghanistan to attend art school and paint vivid, triumphant portraits of faceless women. Although she studied traditional painting and drawing, she prefers the medium of graffiti art, creating her portraits on the walls of shops and fortified compounds in downtown Kabul. She often paints over bullet holes.

“No one had ever done graffiti in Afghanistan before, so people have no idea whether it’s legal or not,” the artist explains. She paints almost exclusively women and relies heavily on the image of the burka or chadri, the full-body cloak that the Taliban forced Afghan women to wear whenever they were in public. Part of Hassani’s goal in creating these fantastical portraits of women still in conservative garb, sometimes with angular figures and suggestive poses, is to expand women’s sense of liberty beyond the garments that cover them physically.