MARINA ABRAMOVIC: ARTIST&PERFORMER

Marina Abramović (Serbian Cyrillic: Марина Абрамовић, Serbo-Croatian pronunciation: [marǐːna abrǎːmoʋitɕ]; born November 30, 1946) is a Serbian-born artist based in New York, a performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Her work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the "grandmother of performance art."

She was born on November 30, 1946 in Belgrade, Serbia. Her great uncle was Patriarch Varnava of the Serbian Orthodox Church.  Both of her parents were Partisans  during the Second World War: her father Vojo was a commander who was acclaimed as a national hero after the War; her mother Danica was a major in the army and, in the 1960s, Director of the Museum of the Revolution and Art in Belgrade.

Abramović's father left the family in 1964. In an interview published in 1998, Abramović described how her "mother took complete military-style control of me and my brother. I was not allowed to leave the house after 10 o'clock at night till I was 29 years old. ... [A]ll the performances in Yugoslavia I did before 10 o'clock in the evening because I had to be home then. It's completely insane, but all of my cutting myself, whipping myself, burning myself, almost losing my life in the firestar, everything was done before 10 in the evening."

Abramović was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade from 1965–70. She completed her post-graduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, SR Croatia in 1972. From 1973 to 1975, she taught at the Academy of Fine Arts at Novi Sad, while implementing her first solo performances.

From 1971 to 1976, she was married to Neša Paripović. In 1976, Abramović left Yugoslavia and moved to Amsterdam.

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Abramovi%C4%87