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.
Lecture 2 : Cotton Pickers and Cosmonauts- Soviet Central Mosaics and the use of Public Arts as Propaganda
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.  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.  Savitsky 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

Lecturer:   Chris Aslam

Chris Aslan was born in Turkey and was raised there and in war-torn Beirut. This set him on a course for an adventurous life and he has spent two years at sea, and lived in Central Asia for 15 years. He started off in Khiva, a desert oasis in Uzbekistan, establishing a UNESCO workshop reviving fifteenth century carpet designs and embroideries, and becoming the largest non-government employer in town. He was deported as part of an anti-Western purge, and took a year in Cambridge to write A Carpet Ride to Khiva. Chris then spent several years in the Pamirs mountains of Tajikistan, training yak herders to comb their yaks for their cashmere-like down. Next came a couple more years in Kyrgyzstan living in the world’s largest natural walnut wood and establishing a wood-carving workshop. Since then, Chris has studied and rowed at Oxford and now divides his time between lecturing for the Arts Society, writing fiction and non-fiction in his mountainous home overlooking the sea in North Cyprus where he is overrun by cats, and returning to Central Asia to lead tours whenever he can, having left a large chunk of his heart there. His latest book is Unravelling the Silk Road