“Liquid Land is co-authored with my father Rustam Effendi, a dissident scientist and entomologist who devoted his life to studying, hunting and collecting butterflies in the Soviet Union. Inherited by the state institute of zoology after his death in 1991, his vast collection has disintegrated: alongside thousands of glass boxes filled with butterfly dust, the only remaining visual evidence of his life's work is the fifty plates of endangered species for a manuscript he never published.

Next to my father's dead but iridescent butterflies, my own work shows life in some of the world's most polluted areas, near Baku, where I was born and grew up. In my mind the contrasting images gravitate towards each other, as I have towards him: since working on this I have got to know him much better than when he was alive. In and around the city the earth is breathing with petroleum fumes, as oil oozes to the surface and turns it liquid.”