Bangladeshi artist Murshida Arzu Alpana is momentarily enjoying her creative scholarship staying in MeetFactory in Prague. Stricken by its genus loci, she makes drawings and pictures reflecting upon her meeting with the Central European metropolis and culture. In her pictures she mixes specific Asian visuals, where manually decorated clothes are a form of a mobile public picture until today. Actual series of her paintings and drawings are a travel diary where Eastern European civilisation encounters elements of Islamic visual tradition.

Momentarily Alpana Arzu has also got a studio in Dhaka (capital of Bangladesh) and also works in Germany for over 15 years. In her country of origin she studied at the academy in Santiniketan at K.G.Subrahmaniyam (Vishva-Bharati University) and later in Berlin at UDK. Her professors were Helmut Otto and Karla Horst Hodicke. Her home stays were reflected for example in a large-format series called „Drinking Bottle Water and Breathing Dust Only“ (Goethe Institute Gallery in Dhaka, 2010), where pictures of devastated city mix with an urgent political appeal of the author. Alpana expresses her anxiety regarding apathy and insensitivity towards a country that in the time of author´s childhood used to a poor, clean and healthy. Being aware of the state of the Western Europe the artist is concerned by unbalanced position of women in Bangladesh high politics. According to her female population voice is overlooked in a long-term by apparatus of bureaucrats and short-sighted traders. Alpana Arzu also openly comments on prejudices against muslin community common in Europe and America. Aware of both religions and cultural worlds she points out the defect of consume and immediate economic effect oriented and society. The culture that Alpana was born in balances individualism with family values and sharing free time in a local community.

Alpana is an experienced nomad who could leave her home country to experience its gradual fall during her returns. It was the consciousness of the fact that a naturally especially beautiful and old traditional country during only a few years gets devastated by a bustling industry development that led the author to express such a large ecologic critical reflexion.

Formally Alpana Arzu expresses herself in a figural painting using brightly colourful palette. In her opinion abstract forms seemed insufficient to address the topic. The combination of texts, landscape and characters that inhabit her paintings correspond with her socially critical painted appeal. There is forwardness similar to many African and American authors that use painting as a form of engaged “journalistic” social critique. (Alfred Thoba – South Africa, Voltaire Hectore - Haiti).