Tove Salmgren is based in Stockholm where she works with performance, dance, choreography, curatorial practices, text and education. She has been active within the field of dance and choreography since 2002.
2015 she received an MFA in Choreography/New Performative Practices, Stockholm University of the Arts, and following year she founded Köttinspektionen dans together with the artist Kajsa Wadhia, an artist-driven platform in Uppsala experimenting with dance and choreography as an art form, politics and relations – a work driven by the curatorial aim to support and develop the field of dance and choreography with the use of playful frameworks to invite, facilitate, document, publish and present artistic processes and practices. Since 2016 the platform is part of the curatorial team behind the annually arranged performance festival Revolve, Uppsala.
As a dance performer since 2002 Tove’s practice has developed into a choreographic practice over time. As a choreographer she has an appetite for shifted perspectives and reality, which often happens through small scale interventions based on the interest in negotiating what art (and non-art) can do, and be, as a place for the emancipatory unknown. Her solo practice is conceptually driven, illogical logical, intuitive and hopeful in her determination to explore self-determination and freedom – often through simple structures and dramaturgies. As an artist she finds interest and pleasure in attending her context as a guest or host; to visit and re-visit stories, relations, ideas, forms, structures, materials or other current practices. She is not concerned with finding the new, but rather to poke something, to do something with what she finds here and now.
The solo performance “I pretend that you speak” (2014) and the curatorial collaboration “We happen things # 3 – a meeting” (2016) were presented at MDT among other pop up places, “This is not a performance” (2017) at Marabouparken and Weld. Her latest solo experiment ”Extension of your ear – a site specific performance lecture” (2021) were presented at Köttinspektionen by an invitation from the art collective Haka. Between 2015-2017, Tove collaborated in various projects with “The Blob” – a curatorial persona by Anna Efraimsson – exercising an institutional critique through playful social and relational interventions overflowing and bending the norms and conventions from within the institutional frames.
Her latest collaborative work is with the performance trio ‘Tender Motor’ (with the artists Moa Franzén and Kajsa Wadhia). The group explores voice-and-body connections as a choreographic vehicle to challenge hegemonies and power relations that can only be experienced in and through the body. Starting from a conceptual framework of ‘choreovocality’, the voice works as the primal choreographic material, a feminist critique and an investigation into the highly politicised, socialized, ideologised body. The trio has created two choreographies “From a throat of flesh” (2018) presented at Weld, Fylkingen and Köttinspektionen, ”When dancing was done with the lungs” (2022) which was developed at residencies at MDT, Weld and Köttinspektionen and presented at Weld. Currently the group are working on their third piece called “Tender Motor” which will premiere at Weld in April, 2025.
Tove is employed at Stockholm University of the Arts as an Assistant Professor of Choreography, and since 2023 as Head of Programme for the Master Programme in Choreography; New Performative Practices (NPP). Tove also work with freestanding courses and teaches feedback and studio methodologies as well as organizational and curatorial practices.