"I emphazize people who are stuck and can't move on with their lives", so says Selda Asal, an artist from Turkey who recently came to Sweden to work on her video Restore Hope: See me!.

Restore Hope: See me! features vulnerable people telling about their lives and making drawings of their own stories. Selda documents the whole process on video and turns it into films by putting the stories together.
"But I am not a journalist! My relationship with the topics and the people I work with is more psychological or philosophical rather than documentary. That’s why it’s taking such a long time. I have been working on Restore Hope since 2004. "

Selda started working with young women who attempted suicide. She has also worked with women forced to flee from their families and prompted to commit suicide because of their "unmoral" way of life.

In February 2008 Selda visited Sweden, where she met three women gone into hiding for different reasons. This is what Selda said before the visit:
"This is going to be exciting. It's the first time I'm doing this outside Turkey so the language will be a problem. And I have just a few days, on top of that. In Turkey I can work with the same people for several weeks."

Selda Asal lives and works in Istanbul and exhibits regularly in many European countries, like, for instance, at the Transponder gallery in Berlin as late as in January 2008. Selda works mainly with video-based art. Over the last year she has been working on a project called Restore Hope, about people who end up living on the outside of society and have no future.

The video installation See me! produced for Swedish Travelling Exhibitions is a development of Restore Hope. In spring 2008 Selda will have more workshops with swedish women living in hiding to make them speak about their situation through their drawings. By editing that together with existing video material she previously made about Turkish women in similar circumstances, Selda will create a new work.

Selda even participated in a group exhibition at the Botkyrka exhibition hall in 2006 and in 1999 she took the initiative to open a gallery for experimental art run by artists - Apartment, still active today in central Istanbul.