Dave Charlesworth · Somerset House, London
A life's work from new commissions in the studio to strategic thinking for towns and cities. Artist, curator, builder of the ecosystems that let ambitious culture exist.
Dave's art practice centres on moving image and performance. The work draws on personal history and the British landscape, using storytelling, roleplay, collaborative creation and drawing on folklore, myth and horror as tools to create immersive encounters that press on the present. Made for galleries, public spaces and the screen.
A world building game created and facilitated by Dave. Working as the keeper of the deck, Dave facilitates the drawing and interpretation of cards which help a player build the picture, history, politics and ecology of an imagined place. Each game is completed through the production of a new card, which is subsequently added to the deck.
The game initially began with nine cards and now features forty five cards. The full deck is purchasable as an edition.
Generously supported by Arts Council England's Emergency Response Fund. Illustrations by Tom Gooch.
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Full archive at dave-charlesworth.com/works
Founder and Director of South Kiosk, a London gallery dedicated to the intersection of technology and contemporary art. Through South Kiosk and an extensive independent programme, Dave has built a curatorial practice spanning over a decade, mounting more than 80 exhibitions across the UK and internationally. Each show examines collaborative practice, digital culture, and how new and redundant technologies reshape how we make and experience art.
A group show bringing together emerging artists exploring place, perspective and situated experience.
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A solo exhibition of new film and moving image work exploring diasporic identity, inheritance and the politics of looking through the lens of carnival and performance culture.
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An exhibition rooted in Yorkshire identity and the language of place, taking its title from a traditional sheep-counting dialect.
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A two-person exhibition by Sun Park and Peter Glasgow.
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A summer screening programme bringing together three collaborative and individual moving image practices.
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A group exhibition across three practices.
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Responding to Ian Nairn's landmark 1955 essay Outrage, this exhibition brought together photographers and artists examining Britain's post-industrial landscape and the legacy of the New Towns movement.
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Three practices converging around constructed digital environments, games culture and the aesthetics of escape.
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A collaborative exhibition held in partnership with SeenFifteen as part of the Peckham 24 photography festival. Exploring the concept of dark adaptation — the process by which eyes adjust from sunlight to darkness — through themes of darkness in both subject and experience.
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An evening of one-off collaborative AV performances by artists and musicians, co-presented by South Kiosk and Where To Now? record label. Each pairing produced a new live work for the night.
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Using the set square, compass and eye as starting points for surveying and constructing global infrastructure, the exhibition brought together new photographic works by Emma Charles alongside Alicja Dobrucka's Life is on a New High series.
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The second iteration of South Kiosk's Chronovisor project, a device for viewing and archiving time-based moving image work in a permanent gallery setting.
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For their first exhibition in their permanent gallery, South Kiosk invited four artists to investigate the relationship between time and land through alternative approaches to the photographic process.
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South Kiosk commissioned a new sound and film installation by James Bulley drawing on archive film material broadcast across the nation — architecture, industry and culture, composed in real-time from a repository of thousands of archival fragments. The viewer is positioned within the material rather than as a spectator.
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South Kiosk's first major exhibition, a one-night event at the Design Museum responding to The Future is Here. Vestige marked the public launch of South Kiosk and set the tone for its focus on technology and contemporary art.
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The first iteration of the Chronovisor project, a group collaboration built around a custom device for moving image presentation. One of South Kiosk's two founding exhibitions alongside Vestige at the Design Museum.
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An investigation into the use of movement and dance in contemporary art, examining choreographed works and individual explorations through video, documentation and live works. Ensemble examines the commonalities and tensions between large-scale cellular works and more individual practice. Private view performances by Ben Judd.
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A screening programme accompanying the Backlit exhibition, examining choreographed works and individual explorations through moving image.
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A group exhibition of four practices.
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Building sustainable infrastructure for the arts isn't administrative work. It's the most creative work there is.
Drawing on over a decade of leading KitMapper and South Kiosk, Dave advises artists, institutions, and arts organisations on sustainable models for creative practice, from production infrastructure to income diversification and touring strategies.
In 2022, Dave worked with Artquest to produce a major paper on The Future of Making, outlining new structural frameworks for how artists can organise their work in the next decade.
Dave serves as a critical friend to Coventry Artspace, one of the UK's longest-running artist-led organisations. The role involves providing honest, outside-eye counsel on strategy, programming, and organisational direction, supporting the team to think clearly about where they're going and why.
Touring exhibitions models · Technical production infrastructure · Arts governance · Artist income diversification · Commissioning structures · Venue partnerships
Tailored one-to-one worksheets for artists and creative practitioners at key moments in their career. Whether you're reassessing your practice, planning a pivot, or working out what comes next, these structured sessions give you the thinking tools to move forward with clarity.
A co-founding and business-building studio for artists and creatives looking to pivot, scale, or build new ventures out of their practice. KitMapper Venture Studios brings production expertise, strategic support, and industry networks to help ambitious artistic practices become sustainable organisations.
W/ Studios
Working with W/ Studios, KitMapper Venture Studios provided strategic, production and infrastructure support that enabled the team to raise £120,000 in a single year, delivering a programme of ambitious immersive exhibitions. A model for what artist-led organisations can achieve with the right systems behind them.
Immersive Arts Prize
KitMapper Venture Studios is involved in the development of the Immersive Arts Prize, supporting the recognition and advancement of immersive practice as a serious and distinct art form.
Working alongside artists from the earliest stages to shape the right organisational structure, business model and identity for their venture.
Helping practitioners who have built significant artistic credibility translate that into new, sustainable forms: touring exhibitions, commercial services, licensing models.
Providing the technical production, installation, and logistical backbone that turns creative ambition into delivered work at scale.
Supporting applications, touring models, and licensing structures that create genuine, recurring income for artists and their organisations.
Founded by Dave Charlesworth, KitMapper is a production company built by artists, for artists, providing the technical infrastructure and creative expertise that ambitious cultural projects demand.
Over more than a decade, KitMapper has delivered complex installations, exhibitions, and large-scale productions across the UK. Working at Somerset House, the Royal College of Art, V&A, and Whitechapel Gallery, the team brings curatorial sensibility to every technical challenge. Most recently, KitMapper has launched a touring exhibitions programme, reducing commissioning costs for venues while giving artists a licensing model that allows their work to earn and travel.
Visit KitMapperKitMapper Ltd · Somerset House · Strand · London WC2R 1LA
You need a projector this week. You shouldn't have to beg for it.
Artists constantly hit the same wall: the work is ready, the space is booked, but the kit is out of reach. Too expensive to hire commercially, too unreliable to borrow. Kitto exists to fix that. A dry-hire AV service built and run by people who've been in that situation, stocked with the equipment artists actually need, priced so it doesn't eat your entire production budget. No faff, no gatekeeping. Just get the work made.
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