Roya Amigh: Presence of the Absent

Roya Amigh, I Still Rise , 2023

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KODA presents Presence of the Absent, a solo exhibition by Bay Area–based artist Roya Amigh, whose work examines the fragile terrain where women’s movements, personal histories, and collective memory intersect. Across installations, drawings, and works on paper created between 2019-2026, the exhibition traces how Amigh’s practice moves between drawing and textile to explore identity through gender, class, sexuality, and the lived experiences of women across generations.

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Amigh constructs layered surfaces from transparent paper and lace before attaching small drawings, mirror fragments, and pieces of cloth. She then cuts these surfaces apart, folds some fragments into three-dimensional forms, and stitches them back together, leaving deliberate gaps. Connections are repeatedly undone and remade, allowing relationships between fragments to shift as the work develops. Removed pieces are never discarded; what feels unnecessary in one work becomes essential in another. Through this slow cycle of cutting, mending, and reassembling, subtraction becomes a generative force, suggesting that nothing is ever entirely lost.

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Her imagery draws from Persian miniature painting, photographs from women’s movements across different geographies, places she has documented in Iran, and stories that stay with her over time. By reducing the vivid colors of miniature painting, reshaping its figures, and emphasizing line, textile, and gesture, she reinterprets the tradition through a quieter, more intimate lens. She gives thread, paper, lace, and cloth a deliberately fragile appearance, allowing these materials to carry memory and emotion and to create spaces where multiple narratives and experiences coexist without hierarchy.

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In her recent works, Amigh turns toward memory, loss, and the traces left behind by violence. Fragmented forms, layered paper, stitching, handwritten text, and repeated marks explore the relationship between the body and its absence. Rather than depicting violence, these works inhabit its aftereffects. They ask what remains when a body is no longer there, how memory attempts to reconstruct what has been taken, and how absence becomes part of daily life. Drawing from personal and collective experiences of grief, the exhibition reflects on the quiet persistence of what refuses to disappear.

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This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.

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