Peer was pleased to present The Goal of Our Health, Alexis Kyle Mitchell’s first solo exhibition in the UK. The New York and Glasgow-based artist works across the mediums of moving image, performance and experimental collaboration. This exhibition encompassed all three as it deepens Mitchell’s interest in the politics of space, place, and embodiment.
The exhibition comprised two works: Mitchell’s hour-long film The Treasury of Human Inheritance (2024) in a new immersive installation; and Plates (2025), a new series of short 16mm black and white film ‘screen tests’. The Goal of Our Health brings these works into dialogue to interrogate how idealised notions of health, movement and ability influence science, technology and the body. The work attends to the ideological origins of the eugenics movement, the shadows of which we continue to live with today.
The Treasury of Human Inheritance comprised hand-processed celluloid film developed using genetic bodily materials – the recipe of which is included as part of the film’s narrative. The footage shows abandoned architectures teeming with new growth, domestic video and audio documentation of Mitchell’s family, and somatic and spiritual rituals for life after death. Reflecting on one family's experience of living with and alongside disease and disability, The Treasury seeks out different forms of kinship and belonging.
Central to the cinematic focus of The Treasury was an immersive analogue synthesiser soundtrack Mitchell created in collaboration with filmmaker and musician Luke Fowler and composer and musician Richy Carey. Resonating throughout the gallery, the 5.1 soundtrack mimics the looping patterns of myotonic dystrophy, a genetic condition that is both described in and structures the content of the film.
The exhibition’s title is drawn from the name of a 1920s photographic publication by Dora Menzler, a German gymnast, whose book depicts the ‘ideal’ body in motion. Mitchell reconstructs these poses in Plates, while also referencing the artist’s ongoing interest in photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s plates of animal locomotion – in particular, his documentation of disabled people moving from the 1880s. Each work lasts the duration of one manual hand-crank of the camera (approx. 30 seconds), while the hand-processed celluloid film is developed using coffee – bringing questions of productivity, labour, and extraction into the material itself.
Throughout the exhibition, Mitchell explores the fragility and weight of history and inheritance. By working with the delicate materiality of celluloid film, developed with genetic and other natural materials, and combined with the mechanisms of repetition and motion, the works in this exhibition wrestle with the aesthetics of authoritarianism in order to undermine the power of their form.
The Goal of Our Health was part of Peer’s 2025 Programme, which addressed themes of inheritance, memory, health and home, and was accompanied by a series of events as part of our Talks, Events and Workshops programme.
