Marina Abramović was born in 1946 in Belgrade. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1970 and continued post-graduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, which she completed in 1972. Between 1970 and 1973, she took part in the shows and activities based at the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade with the Group of Six Artists. From the beginning of her career in the early 1970s, she was interested in performance as a form of visual art, using the body as a subject and medium. In her performances, she explored spiritual and physical endurance. She left Yugoslavia in the mid-1970s and moved to Amsterdam where she worked on performances together with her professional and personal partner, Ulay. They worked together for thirteen years. In their joint performances, they explored the parameters of power and subordination between themselves as artists and the public. After 1988, Abramović began to work and exhibit on her own. Today, Marina Abramović is an acclaimed performance artist internationally and has shown her work in leading museums worldwide. Since leaving Yugoslavia she has never returned, and today lives in New York.

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Lokalizacja:
- New York, United States

Agent Lantos

Lantos was the codename of an agent who worked for the secret service in the early 1980s. His real name is unknown. Lantos wrote reports about student life and political discussions at the Karl Marx University of Economic Sciences (Marx Károly Közgazdaságtudományi Egyetem, or MKKE). He was a student and an active participant in university club life and served as one of the editors of the Közgáz-klub’s bulletin Klub Közlöny (Club Gazette). His file contains 212 pages of reports written between 1979 and 1985.985.

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Lokalizacja:
- Budapest, Hungary

Akimjak, Amantius

Amantius Akimjak (born in 1961, in Levoča), prof., PhDr., ThDr., PhD., developed contacts with the underground movement in the Catholic church already during his studies at the Faculty of Roman Catholic Theology of Cyril and Methodius at Comenius University (from 1980 to 1985). He conducted the Schola Cantorum, a church choir consisting of theology students. Together with them, he compiled 7 collections of songs with notation for children and young people, which became the basis of a wide-scale popularization of the European version of gospel music at a time when the religious movement could address children and young people only illegally. After graduation, he became a chaplain in Levoča (1985) and the administrator of the parish in Haligovce (1989) and in Veľká Lesná. From 1990 to 2000, he studied at the Catholic University in Lublin, Poland. He was a vice-rector of the Catholic University in Ružomberok and a Dean of its Faculty of Education.

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Lokalizacja:
- Spišské Podhradie Spišská kapitula 12, Slovakia 053 04

Albahari, David

The writer David Albahari was born in 1948 in Peja (Kosovo).

He studied English literature and language at the University of Belgrade. His first published book was a collection of short stories in 1973. Among various prizes for his work, the most important are the Ivo Andrić Award for the novel Opis smrti [Description of Death] in 1982 and NIN Award for the novel Mamac [Bait] in 1997. In between 1973 and 1994, Albahari worked in editorial board of many Belgrade and Novi Sad based magazines and publishing houses, such as Književna reč, Pismo, Kulture Istoka, Politika, Mezuza, Prva knjiga Matice srpske, among which the most important in the context of cultural opposition was the magazine Vidici.
Polja was among the first magazines to publish his stories. Albahari reflected on this on the fiftieth anniversary of the magazine, stating how much did this support mean to him. (Polja 435, September/October 2005).

His work has been translated into 14 languages. Albahari was translated among others by Nabokov, Updike and Shepard. Although he moved to Canada in 1994 with his family, Albahari does not consider himself a writer in exile and spends time in Serbia too.

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Alexander, Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one of the most prominent figures in the history of cultural opposition in the Soviet bloc. Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer and novelist whose book The Gulag Archipelago - which was inspired by and documents his own imprisonment in Stalin's labour camps - was one of the most widely distributed literary works via transnational samizdat/tamizdad networks. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970 and was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974.

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