Smith at Auschwitz: Research Product #5

Abstract

Smith at Auschwitz: Research Product #5 is part of an ongoing series of projects that use photography and writing to address, often tangentially, the phenomenon of “dark tourism”. Here the author uses the form of documentary-fiction to consider the production, distribution and consumption of a public art project, staged in Poland, that ostensibly focused on Holocaust tourism in Eastern Europe. The author produces a “cultural biography” of the project that provides an account of: the relationship between it and the promotional value of research in a new English university; the performative nature of a photographic event at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2005; and the project’s reception in the Polish city of Toruń in 2009. Smith at Auschwitz: Research Product #5 was originally performed, by four actors, at Belfast Exposed Gallery as part of the 2013 Belfast Photo Festival.