About
Tender Motor is a non-disciplinary performance trio with backgrounds in visual arts, poetry, choreography, dance and art curation. The group consists of Kajsa Wadhia, Moa Franzén, and Tove Salmgren, a collaboration that has been exploring performance art and choreography since 2018 at the intersection of sound, breath, and movement. The group composes, improvises, and creates live works, curated events, and publications based on a radically process-oriented method that integrates all aspects of their lives into their shared artistic practice. Since January 2025, the group has been running the two-year research project Sonorous Dances and Reverberant Matters, supported by Stockholm University of the Arts’ internal artistic research program. The work of Tender Motor takes the form of choreovocality as point of departure, where the voice works as the primal choreographic and performative material. Tender motor uses the voice both as a tool and a place to explore gender and the human in order to find gaps and cracks in the highly politicized, socialized and ideologized body. Through radical trust in process, in one another, and in the collective, affective, and mutating force that defines the body, their performance practice weaves inward and outward, continuously carried by expansive, soft, pulsating, rhythmic, desiring, joyous, vibrating, and listening forms and sounds.
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Kajsa Wadhia is a choreographer and performance artist, working in the field between performance, dance and voice. Her practice centres on choreovocal methods, collective working processes and speculative feminism. She holds an MA in New Performative Practices from Stockholm University of the Arts (2015). Alongside Tender Motor, Kajsa performs in the duo The Disengaged Free Jazz Orchestra and in the collective Spekulativa Juntan. Since 2016 she is artistic director of Köttinspektionen Dans in Uppsala and co-curator of the international performance festival Revolve. She teaches at the MA programme in New Performative Practices at Stockholm University of the Arts. www.kajsawadhia.com
Moa Franzén is an artist and writer, working in the intersections of performance, visual arts, pedagogy, writing and choreography. Since 2018, she has been part of the performance trio Tender Motor, alongside Kajsa Wadhia and Tove Salmgren. She co-runs Wedding Press, an artist-run riso press and an art project in the intersection between visual art and literature dedicated to exploring alternative modes of artistic self-publishing methods. In early 2026 she made her musical debut on clarinet with her first album, Tremor, as part of the experimental duo Silva. Franzén holds a MFA in New Performative Practices from the Stockholm University of Arts. www.moafranzen.se
Tove Salmgren is based in Stockholm, where she works with performance, dance, and choreography. Since 2002, she has been active as a dance performer, a practice that has gradually expanded into the broader fields of curation, education, and artistic research. As an artist, she is interested in art’s exceptional potential to negotiate and reorganize materials from everyday life, and to challenge what we take for granted through performative experiments that revolve around self-determination, critique, togetherness, and wonder. In 2016, Tove and Kajsa Wadhia founded Köttinspektionen Dans, a platform in Uppsala dedicated to experimental dance and choreography, hosting residencies and festivals for contemporary dance and choreographic practices. She is currently employed as an Assistant Professor of Choreography at Stockholm University of the Arts. Since 2023, she has been the leader of the Master’s Programme New Performative Practices (NPP). www.tovesalmgren.se