Anju Dodiya (b. 1964, India) studied her B.F.A  from the J.J.School of Art, Mumbai where she lives and work.

The self is at the center of Anju Dodiya's works. Though not solipsistic, the majority of her works give the viewer access to private moments, lifted from "the private discourse that goes on within oneself when one is alone". Dodiya initially resisted the lure of self-portraiture: Her early works were extremely abstract, and following her first show ("a fictional autobiography"), she tried to refocus her gaze on railway stations, roadside scenes, and so forth. Yet ultimately she found her original impulse of a painterly introspection was the strongest, and rechanneled her vision into describing situations from her life.

Dodiya describes her relationship with contemporary Western art as ambivalent. To her, the practice of conceptual art as seen in India seems more a response to international fashions than an authentic portrayal of the art process. Her own art remains rooted in the figurative, and her debts to the West are mostly to Giotto, Massacio, and other painters of the Italian Renaissance. As with those painters, all elements within her paintings are charged with an emotional value. "Often," she says, "I use furniture or, say, a curtain or a door to speak".

In the biennial Anju Dodiya has created a painting-installation from her work Forked (2005):

Forked in The Expanded Field (145 158), acrylic and fabric, picture HERE

Lara Favaretto. Born in Treviso, Italy, in 1973, Favaretto studied at Academia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan, and Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como. She works in photography, video and performance.

In her installations, performances, films, and photographic work, Favaretto creates situations and atmospheres that are in continuous metamorphosis, and that gain power in relation to the viewers' memories and experiences. Viewers are invited to participate in the process of creating meaning for, and stories about, the objects. Favaretto's improvisatory work invokes a magic realism, in which the unconscious and the dreamlike proliferate in positive and negative encounters with the real.

For the Ladonia Biennial Lara Favaretto is represented with the project Shortlist of Dead Memories: Bas Jan Ader, Ambrose Bierce, Bobby Fischer

Ceal Floyer (b. 1965, UK) studied 1991-94 BA at Goldsmiths College, London, she lives and works in Berlin.

Floyer's work is a playful form of minimalism. Rather than presenting materials to reveal their pared down, formal or essentially aesthetic qualities, her project is more literal - what you see is what you get. Or may be not...

The use of pun, double entendre and at times blatant trickery, is an essential ingredient to Floyer's work.

For the Ladonia Biennial Ceal Floyer has used two of her earlier works: Projection (Nail) from 1997 was shown in the Venice Biennial in 2003. In Ladonia Biennial the projection of a nail is to be seen on the surface of the mountain behind Nimis. For the construction of Nimis around 175 000 nails have been used. A humorous and site specific comment by the artist. Pictures HERE. 

In 2001 she performed Nail Biting Performance in the Symphony Hall in Birmingham, England. She walked onto the stage at Birmingham Symphony Hall immediately prior to the beginning of a concert and bit off her fingernails into the microphone. This performance was hosted by the Ikon Gallery Birmingham (England) and an Ikon Gallery text reports: "Her 'nail biting performance' took stage-fright as its subject, the artist, bit her fingernails into a microphone for five minutes. The sight of her alone amongst the musicians' empty chairs, accompanied by the amplified sound of nervousness was affecting and tense."

Renata Lucas (born 1971, Brazil, lives and works São Paulo) Renata Lucas’s practice is a critical interpretation of how our built environment determines actions, behaviour and social relationships, and by extension, society’s dependency on the preservation of prescribed definitions of space, property and order. By offering an alternative spatial imagination—one that brings into consideration malleability, manipulation and play—Lucas provokes the possibility of new subjective and collective engagement within our built environment.   

For the Ladonia Biennial Renata Lucas has made the project Commonplace Intervention.

Mike Bouchet (b. 1970, US, lives and works in Frankfurt) he often works towards effects of dislocation and displacement. The work in recent years seems to present a compulsion to alter one's place in the world by reproducing and re-contextualizing "desirable" things in and of the world. His projects and exploits are one-to-one models—real transactions with their own autonomy and agency. You cannot alter your place in the world without first altering your image of the world. Bouchet's endeavor goes beyond representation or a kind of DIY ("do-it-yourself") prudence, into what can best be described as a real-life parody. This artist uses everything at his disposal to grow, package, and pitch his own products. In systems such as these, even real transactions are not completely convincing, the reification of one's product through extensive image production is needed to make it completely viable.  

In the Venice Biennial 2009 he presented a full-size two-story American House emerging from the water. In the Ladonia Biennial he has made an even more impressive project, for a short time moving the German Reichstag from Berlin till Ladonia: Floating Reichstag 2009. Picture here.

Pietro Roccasalva (born 1970 in Modica, lives and works in Milan) is one of the most singular and promising Italian artists in the post-Cattelan generation in Italy. His work is a visionary and erudite mix of conceptual rigour and hallucinatory extravaganza: starting from painting as his main medium of expression and ranging from sculpture to installation, from "tableaux vivants" to drawing and film, Roccasalva's creative world is an unceasing investigation into the meaning of images and how we relate to them.

His iconic obsessions are always set in complex installations in which the different elements act like characters on a stage, performing an erratic script that probes a wide range of historical references, from art history to philosophy, music, and literature.

Roccasalva’s exhibitions are a trail in which the flow of information is framed in different "stages", formally closed and autonomous (settings, installations, sculptures, videos and digital images) but also part of a wider process. Fluency and solidity pursue each other and exchange until they crystallize in the dynamic two-dimensionality of the painting-processor. What remains is a screenplay, or a musical score, not written beforehand but rather determined by the event and by an artificer unaware and unwilling: "the purpose flourishes through the outcome".  

For the Ladonia Biennial the artist has made a new version of his two installations A Jockey Full of Bourbon I and II.

Pae White (b. 1963, Pasadena, California, US) is one of the most significant women artists participating in the international dialog about the intersection of art and design today. She embraces a wide range of artistic traditions, from the work of the Bauhaus to Charles and Ray Eames to Isamu Noguchi. Born and raised in Pasadena, White uses a palette inspired by the era of the 1970s, She is best known for her sculptural installations, which celebrate color and a tenuous kind of anti-form.

Of all the artist/designers today White is one of the few to surrender the distinction and admit that the two jobs are virtually interchangeable, as are the distinctions between private and public work.  

Pae White has made two works for the biennial, Rover Momentum (picture here) and Clubhouse for Dogs.

Sara Ramo, b. 1975 in Madrid, Spain, lives and works in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Master in Visual Arts from the EBA, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil. She lives and works in Brazil. A rising artist who is participating in the Venice Biennial 2009.

In her artwork, Ramo appropriates everyday elements and scenes, displacing them from their original context and rearranging them in her videos, photographs, collages, sculptures and installations. The artist investigates the moment at which the objects stop making sense in people’s lives in order to create situations bereft of calm and order, making the world appears helter-skelter. Both formal and conceptual strategies overlap in a constant enactment of mapping a chaotic reality.

In the Ladonia Biennial Sara Ramo is showing her video work The House of Hansel and Gretel.

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