The Goal of Our Health

16 Oct-21 Mar 2026

Overview

A new solo exhibition by New York and Glasgow-based artist and filmmaker Alexis Kyle Mitchell.

Bringing together an immersive installation of her feature-length film The Treasury of Human Inheritance (2024) and a new series of 16mm “screen tests” titled Plates, alongside archival materials and new large-scale textile works, the exhibition explores how notions of health, ability and inheritance are inscribed on the body through science and technology – often in ways still shaped by the harmful legacies of Eugenics-based ideology.  

The Treasury of Human Inheritance weaves together intimate relationships and personal rituals with footage of abandoned architectures, archival materials and philosophical inquiry to explore the entanglements of memory, inheritance and the limitations of language to describe existential experiences of grief, illness and kinship. Its looping analogue synthesizer soundtrack, created with artists Luke Fowler and Richy Carey, echoes the rhythms of myotonic dystrophy – a genetic condition that both appears in and structures the film. Plates reinterprets early studies of the ‘ideal’ body in motion, restaging gymnast poses on film, each held for the length of a single hand-crank of the camera.

Alexis Kyle Mitchell

Alexis Kyle Mitchell is an artist whose work critically engages with feminist and disability studies, exploring how embodied knowledge challenges dominant narratives around health and identity. Exhibitions include Peer Gallery, London; Glasgow International, Glasgow; GTA24 MOCA Triennial, Toronto; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Kunstverein Munich; and Mercer Union, Toronto; screenings at International Film Festival Rotterdam; Art of the Real, New York; and IndieLisboa International Film Festival, Lisbon; performances at MOCAToronto; University of Toronto and the New School, New York. Residencies include Cove Park (Scotland); MacDowell (USA); Sommerakademie Paul Klee (Switzerland); and Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany). Mitchell was a postdoctoral fellow at New York University in the Center for Disability Studies and is currently a visiting scholar in the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.