The planetary scale of anthropogenic climate disruption calls for the rethinking of practices, epistemologies and histories to uncover the interconnected roots of the crisis and face up to its magnitude. Situating the unfolding of the Anthropocene across socialist territories entails thinking systemically about the conflicted legacies of the socialist way of organizing nature. In this presentation we will consider the contribution of contemporary art and art history in unravelling the contradictions, revealing the multiplicities and activating the potentialities of the Socialist Anthropocene, with a focus on the entwined artistic and environmental histories of the Aral Sea.