A Conversation With Rena Effendi

Thursday, March 27, 2014, 18.30

One Square Meter stage hosts an artist talk by Rena Effendi from the exhibition Neighbours. Photographer Rena Effendi speaks about her recent works and has a conversation with the audience, moderated by one of the exhibition curators, Paolo Colombo.

Born in 1977 in Baku, Azerbaijan, Rena Effendi grew up in the USSR - witnessing her country’s rough path to independence, one marred by war, political instability and economic collapse. The chaotic 1990s strongly impacted the way Effendi perceives photography, as she attempted to make visual sense of the fragile world that surrounded her. Educated as a linguist, she took her first photographs in 2001 while she was attending painting classes. Both researcher and photographer, Effendi applies this double identity in the most visible fashion.

Since 2007, Rena Effendi has been photographing in the post-Soviet region, as well as Turkey and Iran, including the 2008 Russia – Georgia conflict, women victims of heroin and sex trafficking in Kyrgyzstan and female survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which in 2012 was short-listed for the Prix Pictet Award in Photography and Sustainability. In 2011, Effendi became the laureate of the Prince Claus Fund Award for Cultural Development and moved to Cairo where she is currently based. In 2013, Schilt Publishing released Rena Effendi’s second monograph “Liquid Land”, a personal narrative, combining her father’s photographs of rare Azerbaijani butterflies with her images of environmentally devastated landscapes and people living among destruction in her native city of Baku.

Rena Effendi, 1977
Hınalık Köyü, 2006-2009
Khinaliq Village, 2006-2009
(Detail)