Tove Salmgren is based in Stockholm where she works with performance, dance and choreography, as an initiator and collaborator in different artistic contexts and formats. 2015 she received an MFA in Choreography from ”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.
Tove has been active as a dance performer in various contexts since 2002, which has slowly developed into a choreographic practice of her own. As a choreographer, she explores shifted perspectives and reality, often through interventions of a minor scale, based on the interest in negotiating what art (and non-art) can do and be as a place for the emancipatory unknown. As an artist she considers her work as a dialogue with contextual materials; the artistic eco-system as an assembly of relations, materials, ideas, practices and forms to attend as a host and guest, to connect, highlight and create links through a lense of criticality. In this way she is not so much occupied by creating something new or to produce new meanings, but rather to do something critical to what she finds in the assembly of things. The art medium as a place to reflect on itself, it’s conventions, procedures, relations and ideas through its particular scales, paces and patterns is used to reflect on the scales, paces and patterns of the world. The choreographic practice is further grounded in an idea of knowledge as something local and subjectively situated, which is an ethical standpoint that configures the work as a critical space for those involved; herself, collaborators and audiences.
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.
Since 2018 she forms a performance trio together with Moa Franzén and Kajsa Wadhia, which explores the voice as physical materiality and choreographic tool and a feminist critique questioning how body and voice interconnects as each others’ becomings. The trios sound choreography “From a throat of flesh” (2018) has been presented at Weld, Fylkingen and Köttinspektionen and the group is currently working on the performance ”When dancing was done with the lungs” which has developed at residencies at MDT, Weld and Köttinspektionen, with upcoming performances at Weld, Stockholm.
Tove is employed at Stockholm University of the Arts as an Assistant Professor of Choreography, where she works at the Department of dance and closely with the master education NPP, and freestanding courses including feedback methodologies, studio practices and organizational and curatorial practices.