From Muhammed To Marx: The Changing Face Of Art and Textile In Central Asia

A three-lecture study day exploring the period before, during and after the Communist Revolution, focussing on Central Asia and the way in which it was transformed.

Lecture 1:

Colouring The Russian Empire: Prokudin-Gorsky, Pioneer Of Colour Photography

This lecture examines the rise of fall of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, and his pioneering use of digichromatography, creating stunning colour photographs decades before colour photography was supposedly invented. Dazzling Russian royalty with his photographs, he was commissioned by the Tsar to traverse the largest continual Empire in the world to document its land and peoples. He was given permits allowing him to travel in restricted areas and furnished with a whole railway carriage, transformed into a dark-room. He captured traditional ways of life from as far afield as Samarkand and the desert oases of the Turkmens and Tajiks, soon to be swept away by the Bolshevik revolution.

Lecture 2 :

Cotton Pickers and Cosmonauts- Soviet Central Mosaics And The Use Of Public Arts As Propoganda

This lecture explores the birth of the Soviet mosaic from its roots in Islamic mosaics and Communist propagandist posters through to the question of preservation in post-Soviet Central Asia. We explore why Soviet thinking was so keen to bring art out of galleries and into public spaces, and how, in an era when Socialist Realism was the only permitted artistic expression, every public artwork came with a message, a value and an agenda. How did Soviet artists deal with the uncomfortable reality that Muslim Central Asia was a Russian colonial conquest?

Lecture 3 :

Banned - Savitsky And The Secret Hoard Of Avant Garde Art

Despite the flourishing of Russian Avante Garde Art during the first 30 years of the 20th Century, as Stalin rose to power, he banned all but Socialist Realist expressions of art. To own anything else was dangerous enough but to start collecting it was unthinkable. And yet this is what Igor Savitsky did. He travelled throughout the Soviet Union, buying, bribing and cajoling until he’d amassed the second largest collection of Russian Avante Garde art in the world. The State Museum of Karakalpakstan, situated near the south shores of the Aral Sea is now a Mecca for art lovers.