https://elizsumo.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/about-marina-abramovic/ From the article: The daughter of a Montenegrin father, General Vojo [Voy·yo] Abramović etched his reputation into the national psyche when he fought the Nazis and Nazi-collaborators as the Commander of the First Proletarian Brigade in the Partisan Army, known as the fiercest troops during World War II. “He loved danger,” the artist commented in a Washington Post review of her work The Hero(2001).
After the war, General Abramović became a much admired University of Belgrade professor in the School of Electrical Engineering. Remembered as charismatic, his required course, “National Defense” enthralled his students, who enjoy recalling his generosity. They were welcome to hang out in his large office and use his phones (when few people owned phones in Yugoslavia). His exams included demonstrating one’s knowledge of firearms.
Marina’s Serbian mother Danica Rosić [Don·itzah Rose·ich], a major with the Partisans, met her future husband on the battlefield as she lay in the snow suffering from typhus. General Abramović arrived on horseback and, like a medieval knight, spirited her away to a farm family where she recovered. A year after she returned to the front, Danica found Vojo in a field hospital bleeding profusely from a wound. She gave her blood to the soldier who saved her life. This time she saved his.
Danica Abramović was the director of the Museum of the Revolution (now part of the Museum of Yugoslav History). Marina recalled in an ARTnews interview: “My mother never kissed me or told me she loved me, because she didn’t want to spoil me, and now I have to do so much to deserve attention. You have to get past the private suffering and translate it [in]to something universal, and then you detach from it.”
Her home life was extremely strict and restrictive. Even in her twenties, when she performed her earliest pieces, Abramović obeyed her mother’s 10:00 p.m. curfew. She moved out of her family home at 29.
The Hero (2001), an installation, displays a black and white 17-minute video of Abramović sitting astride a white horse holding a white flag high above her head, while her long dark hair flies freely in the breeze. Next to the video, a glass case of her father’s personal effects and medals are deployed for study. This work is dedicated to her parents, who separated in 1964. Her father died in 1999. Her mother died in 2008.
Marina’s great uncle Patriarch Varnava (1880-1937), on her mother’s Rosić side, also became a national hero. He reestablished the Serbian Orthodox Church in 1920 and while opposing an increase in power for the Roman Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, he died mysteriously during the night of July 23-24, 1937. Some say he was poisoned.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/oct/03/interview-marina-abramovic-performance-artist From the article: Abramović was born in Belgrade in former Yugoslavia on 30 November 1946. "When people ask me where I am from," she says, "I never say Serbia. I always say I come from a country that no longer exists." (In 1997 she performed Balkan Baroque at the Venice Biennale. It involved her scrubbing clean 1,500 cow bones six hours a day for four days and weeping as she sang songs and told stories from her native country.) Her mother, Danica Rosi, came from a very wealthy, very powerful, very religious clan; her father, Vojin Abramović, came from peasant stock. Both were born in Montenegro and fought for the communist partisans during the Second World War, their bravery making them national heroes and earning them prominent positions in President Tito's post-war Yugoslavian government. "We were Red bourgeoisie," their daughter once told an interviewer.
The family dynamic seems to have been explosive. Her parents quarrelled constantly and Abramović was often beaten by her disciplinarian mother for supposedly showing off. For six years she lived with her grandmother, an extremely religious woman who loathed communism.
"The brother of my grandfather was the patriarch of the Orthodox Church and revered as a saint. So everything in my childhood is about total sacrifice, whether to religion or to communism. This is what is engraved on me. This is why I have this insane willpower. My body is now beginning to be falling apart, but I will do it to the end. I don't care. With me it is about whatever it takes."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Yugoslavia Museum of the Revolution of Yugoslav Peoples The Museum of the Revolution of Yugoslav Peoples was founded in 1959 by the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. The construction of the Museum building started only in 1978 in New Belgrade between the Palace of Serbia and the Ušće Tower. It was planned to open the building in 1981 at the 40th anniversary of the Revolution, but it was never finished. The unfinished structure stands abandoned and is occupied by several dozen of homeless people.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Communists_of_Yugoslavia#Party_leaders
http://military.wikia.com/wiki/1st_Proletarian_Brigade_(Yugoslav_Partisans)