Greg Girard is a Canadian photographer whose work has examined the social and physical transformations throughout Asia's biggest cities for more than five decades. Since returning to Vancouver, after living in Hong Kong and Shanghai between 1982 and 2011, he continues to photograph the shifts in the social and physical landscape of the city where was born. He is the author of numerous photographic books. City of Darkness Revisited, published 2014, revives an early collaboration with co-author Ian Lambot, and updates their influential book, City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City (Watermark, 1993). While based in Shanghai between 1998 and 2011, he produced his first photographic monograph, Phantom Shanghai (Magenta, Toronto, 2007), with a foreword by novelist William Gibson. The series illuminates the rapid and at times violent changes in the urban fabric as China's largest city raced to remake itself at the beginning of the 21st Century.

Silke Schmickl is a curator whose work engages with the contemporary art scenes in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Presently working at M+, she was previously a curator at the National Gallery Singapore, the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, researcher at the German Art History Center in Paris and the co-founding director of Lowave, a Paris-based curatorial platform and publishing house for artists' moving images (2001-2016). She has curated exhibitions in partnership with museums and biennials in Singapore, Paris, Guangzhou, Beirut and Düsseldorf. Recent exhibitions at the National Gallery Singapore include Minimalism: Light. Space. Object (2019); Rirkrit Tiravanija: untitled 2018 (the infinite dimensions of smallness); Haegue Yang: Forum for Drone Speech: Singapore Simulations, as well as a series of film programmes as part of the Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia, 1960s-1990s exhibition. Other curatorial projects include, Body Politics, Beirut Art Fair, Beirut (2014); Going Places, The Arts House, Singapore (2014); Human Frames, KIT-Kunst-im-Tunnel, Düsseldorf (2011); Reframing Reality, Museet for Samtidskunst, Roskilde, (2011); and Middle East Video Channel, 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art (2008). Schmickl studied art history, French literature and intercultural communications at the Ludwig-Maximilian Universität in Munich and Sorbonne-Panthéon-Paris1-University in Paris where she graduated with a MA in Art History on Thomas Struth's 'Museum Photographs'. Born in 1974 in Germany, she currently lives and works in Hong Kong. SAF participation: March Meeting 2021.