Dan Graham: Death by Chocolate

In 2005 Director of Visual Arts at the Banff Centre Anthony Kiendl invited artists Dan Graham and Dara Birnbaum as visiting artists for a summer residency. A field trip was hastily organized with Graham and participants in the visual arts residency to the West Edmonton Mall. Graham had documented the mall in 1986—at the time the largest shopping mall in the world—and wished to incorporate the footage into a new video. The result was Death by Chocolate, a video which merged the two visits, both of which featured artists from the Banff Centre, who also worked on the production. Produced by Graham at the Banff Centre in Canada, Graham's new video draws on nearly twenty years' worth of footage shot in the bizarre yet familiar arena of the shopping mall. The resulting work provides Graham’s idiosyncratic view of mall culture: blending shopping with a theme park; its architecture, its social interactions, and its peculiar consumerist logic. This work also provides a corollary to Graham's own prodigious writings and projects on the public spaces of corporate capitalism.

Dan Graham was born in Urbana, Illinois, USA in 1942 and died in New York, New York, USA in 2022. For fifty years, Graham traced the symbiosis between architectural environments and their inhabitants. His practice encompassed curating, writing, performance, installation, video, photography and architecture.

Above: video still from Dan Graham, Death by Chocolate (1986-2005), 8 minutes, colour, sound. Courtesy of the artist.