Madelon Vriesendorp (born 1945) is a Dutch artist best known as one of the co-founders of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in the early 1970s (together with her husband Rem Koolhaas and Elia and Zoe Zenghelis).Vriesendorp is, though, the opposite of easy to pin down.

Trying to label her — surrealist artist sculptor, collaborator, mother, householder, host, collector and curator — suggests a boxed-up, product-based view of a creative life which is actually the opposite of the extraordinary critical, hilarious and productive work and environment she generates. Does it even feel like work? "No. It feels like playing around," she says.

Visiting her flat is something special — a short immersion in her world. The flat is filled with hundreds upon hundreds of tiny items, carefully and critically found, bought, made, received, added together, arranged, grouped, perhaps reincorporated into paintings, stories or other objects.

She’s most interested in "cultural mistakes", like a Father Christmas on a cross, things changed by mistranslation. The main collection is formed by the ranks of tiny objects grouped by type — buildings, devils, body parts; objects from the inside of snowdomes; figures from Kinder Eggs made of wax, metal, plastic, paper, stone; and a couple of feathers.

In the biennial Vriesendorp has installed a huge version of the Statue of Liberty. Earlier she has made an animated film about the famous sculpture. A second small object has been placed among the stones close to the Ladonia Bar. It is a sculptural version of Jules Joseph Lefebre’s painting La Verité from 1970. This painting probably inspired the French sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi who presented his first model in the same year. Pictures can be found in New Herald.

Keren Cytter (b. 1977, Israel) is a filmmaker based in Europe. The central element in her work is the long monologue or narration — a literary device that spins her tales in a philosophical and sometimes surreal fashion. Meanwhile, visually, her use of the handicam lends a rough documentary feel, and the viewer becomes aware of a disconnect between narrative and image. Cytter is also an accomplished author, and has written novels, poetry, and an opera libretto.

The subject matter of her work is the stuff of relationships – loss, loving, longing, friendship, betrayal – much of it culled from her own or her friends’ lives. While the language may be bookish, the topics are pure soap opera, and the disjunction between the words and images adds to the melodramatic flavour.  

In the biennial Keren Cytter’s is showing the work My Greatest Hits, a collection of highlights from four of her videos: 

Continuity 2005

The Victim 2006

Der Spiegel 2007

Les Ruissellements du Diable 2008

Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) has become one of the most prominent and influential photographers to emerge during the 1990's. He profiles the lifestyles of his immediate circle of friends, working collaboratively with his subjects so that they lose their inhibitions in front of the camera. Tillmans produces raw, confessional images yet stays within the traditional genres of portraiture, landscape and still-life. His ability to produce powerful and sometimes shocking images has brought him success in art galleries and mainstream media alike. An aspect of his artistic practice is to assume a curatorial role—he creates configurations with his photographs that draw formal, symbolic and ephemeral connections. His installations encourage active audience engagement and ask viewers to consider their own experiences within Tillmans’s visual world. He won the Turner Prize in 2000.

In the biennial a special exhibition of Wolfgang Tillman’s work is on show in the New Museum.

Pictures from top to bottom:

Wolfgang Tillmans visiting Ladonia

Poster for the exibition

Generation 2009

Art Gallery 2009

Aleksandra Mir was born in Poland 1967. She is also a Swedish citizen growing up in Partille, Gothenburg. She lives and works in New York.

Mir's work is not traditional; she often works outdoors on novel media. For example, she once transformed a Dutch beach into a lunar surface and declared herself the First woman on the moon (1999). She has also published biographies of ordinary people and staged a nine-to-five cinema, showing disaster films for the unemployed.

Her works often take the form of social processes that are open for anyone who wishes giving the work meaning. The work of art is an exercise that operates in everyday life; a humanistic and playful organism with a large social appetite. The work's course of events is often started by Mir as a situation-bound joint between specific events, and the work's location.

For the Ladonia Biennial Mir has created an amazing project: Ladonia Pavilion. Ladonia will participate in the Venice Biennial and the artist will bring the Ladonia pavilion to Venice. The Ladonia pavilion is in 90 parts; each of them the size of a plastic disposable cup. Each part will be an exhibition area for the 90 artists in the Ladonia Biennial as well as for the 90 artists in the Venice Biennial. More information and pictures of her project in New Herald.

Miranda July (Born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger, 1974, USA) is a performer, a writer, a filmmaker, and an instigator, in various combinations and often all at once. Her unique aesthetic, deeply idiosyncratic yet strangely comforting, reached a wider audience through her first feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005). The film premiered at Sundance, where it received the special jury prize for originality of vision, and went on to win the Camera d’Or at Cannes.

 In the biennial she will make several performances and make a large installation in East Ladonia with small and big stones. She will write sentences on the stones and the audience is welcome to find these messages.

Tony Conrad (b. 1940, USA) is a pivotal figure in contemporary culture. His multi-faceted contributions since the 1960s have influenced and redefined music, filmmaking, minimalism, performance, video and conceptual art.

Known for his groundbreaking film "The Flicker", his involvement in the Theatre of Eternal Music and the evolution of the Velvet Underground, and collaborations with a host of luminaries including Jack Smith, John Cale, Mike Kelley and Henry Flynt, Conrad remains a radical figure who challenges our understanding of art history.   

In the biennial Tony Conrad is represented with Yellow Movie, 1972/2009, a music video performance.

Goshka Macuga (b. 1967), a Polish-born artist based in London, tests and transcends the boundaries of sculpture, installation, exhibition design and photography. She ventures into a variety of disciplines, including art making, curating, art history, ethnology, psychology and esoteric science. Macuga's many exhibition projects and publications converge in a multi-faceted oeuvre that cannot be squeezed into such pigeonholes as "politically committed" or "formalist." In short, her work is rigorous in form and anarchistic in content.

The artist's practice has always been marked by an interest in collaboration with other artists and cultural producers. Macuga also makes extensive use of existing cultural material: original arts and crafts; documents related to historical figures, such as artists, their patrons and their opponents; forms of exhibition display devised and applied in diverse political contexts; and references to vernacular culture. For Macuga, art is a tool for understanding and a blueprint for social change.

  For the Biennial the artist has created an event of installations What in a War (The Raft Memorial). She has borrowed Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of Medusa (1818)  from the Louvre for a short exhibition in Ladonia. Also included in the project is a public sculpture of the Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt.

André Cadere (1943-78) Poland

André Cadere was born in Poland, grew up in Romania and, before his early death from cancer in Paris in 1978, was a nomadic presence in the European art world. He was best known for his Barres de bois rond (Round Wooden Bars, 1970–78) – long poles made of coloured wooden cylindrical units. The colours on each rod were arranged according to a system, yet each stick contained one anomaly, confounding attempts to identify the system with ease. His Barres could be positioned in all sorts of relations to their surroundings (on walls, floors, propped between the two and so on), but he would also carry them around a number of outdoor locations and, most famously, into other people’s shows and openings, even when not invited.

Surprisingly Cadere visited Ladonia before the country proclaimed its independency. A rare photo from the 70s shows the artist walking around in Ladonia with one of his famous "Barres".

Another of the Bars is placed in the Tower of the Winds.