Rena Effendi is a filmmaker, writer, and award-winning documentary photographer based in Cairo, Egypt. She is also the author of two monographs, Pipe Dreams: A Chronicle of Lives along the Pipeline and Liquid Land. Her photography has been described as having a deep sense of empathy with a quiet celebration of the strength of the human spirit. She is the laureate of the Prince Claus Fund Award and has been shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Pictet Award in Photography and Sustainability.
Effendi’s work has been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Istanbul Modern, the Venice Biennial, and NYC MOMA. She is a National Geographic Explorer and a frequent contributor to National Geographic Magazine.
Rena Effendi
Azerbaijan
Liquid Land
Liquid Land is co-authored by Rena Effendi and her father Rustam Effendi, a dissident scientist and entomologist who devoted his life to studying, hunting and collecting over 90,000 butterflies in the Soviet Union. His vast collection, inherited by the Azerbaijani State Institute of Zoology after his death in 1991, has disintegrated.
Alongside thousands of glass boxes filled with butterfly dust, the only remaining visual evidence of Rustam’s life’s work is the fifty photographs of endangered butterflies for a manuscript he never published. Carefully placed on plants, they shine with vibrant colours, yet he had to kill each one of them for a picture, piercing his microscopic pins through them. His work was made in the fresh mountain air. The butterflies that he hunted since he was a boy are spectacularly symmetrical.
Next to her father’s dead but vivid butterflies, these photographs show life near Baku, where Rena was born and grew up. She photographs the barren, liquid land of Absheron, its environmental and urban decay, its people living amid the chaos of extreme industrial pollution. In her mind, the contrasting images gravitate towards each other, as she has to her father.