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Museum of Broken Relationships: Love found and lost
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Tokens of love: Visitors view items on display at the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia. (Museum of Broken Relationships/File)
F
rom a toaster to an ax, each of the seemingly ordinary items on display comes with an emotionally charged story of love – found, cherished and lost.
Zagreb’s Museum of Broken Relationships is probably the most memorable museum I’ve been to.
The museum started out in 2006 as an art project by Zagreb artist couple, film producer Olinka Vištica and sculptor Dražen Grubišić, three years after their four-year relationship had come to an end. They later asked friends to donate objects left behind from their breakups, and the collection was born.
Read also: From Zagreb with love
The collection has traveled the world over to more than 40 cities, and garnering more tokens of lost love in the process.
In its out-of-the box concept, the museum, which opened in 2010 in the beautiful baroque Kulmer Palace in Zagreb’s historical Upper Town area, offers the chance to overcome emotional loss through creation by contributing to its collection, in hopes of inspiring a personal search for deeper insights and to strengthen one’s belief in something more meaningful than grief.
“Whatever the motivation for donating personal belongings — be it sheer exhibitionism, therapeutic relief or simple curiosity — people embraced the idea of exhibiting their emotional legacy as a sort of ritual, a solemn ceremony,” the writing says on the museum’s wall. “Our societies acknowledge marriages, funerals, and even graduation farewells, but deny us any formal recognition of the demise of a relationship, despite its strong emotional effect.”
One of the exhibits, titled An Ex-Axe (1995, Berlin, Germany), tells the story of an axe used by a woman to chop up her partner’s furniture before neatly arranging the fragments into small piles for her former lover to take away.
Another, The Toaster of Vindication (2006-2010, Denver, Colorado), is simply explained in gleeful mean-spiritedness: “When I moved out, and across the country, I took the toaster. That’ll show you. How are you going to toast anything now?”
