The archive · Public & Social · Product decision · 2006-2010
Museum of Broken Relationships turns ex-lovers' keepsakes into a global exhibit
Zagreb artists Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić turned breakup leftovers into a museum — permanent in 2010, toured to 50 cities, second home in LA.
Museum of Broken Relationships (Zagreb)
What it had to solve
When the two Zagreb artists' own relationship ended, they faced what every ex-couple faces: what to do with objects loaded with shared memory. Society marks the start of love but offers no ceremony for its end.
How it works
In 2006, after the Croatian artists Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić broke up, they refused to throw away or split the objects they had collected together. Instead of letting love's remains end in the garbage bin, they turned the dilemma into an art project: exhibit the tokens of ended relationships, with each donor's story attached.
The format was simple and public: anyone could donate an object from a finished relationship and write the story behind it, and the museum displayed the pair together — anonymous, captioned, and therefore readable as art. What began with friends' contributions (100 discarded roses, airsickness bags, a head-massager) travelled to more than 20 countries before finding a permanent home at Zagreb's Kulmer Palace in 2010.
The museum grew into an institution: it drew over 1,000 visitors a week, won the European Museum Forum's Kenneth Hudson Award in 2011, toured to more than 50 cities worldwide, and opened a second permanent location in Los Angeles in 2016. Donors kept participating — about 200 objects arrive by mail every year — because the project gave a universal, normally private emotion a public place.
Why it lands
- It solved a private problem with a public form: instead of burning or boxing memories, people could hand them to a shared ritual.
- It inverted museum logic — the audience donates the collection, and each object's caption turns an ordinary item into a work with context.
- It gave heartbreak a culture: a sanctioned place for the grief of relationships that society usually does not acknowledge.
- Anonymous, universal stories let the format travel: the same exhibition collected objects in more than 20 countries without a franchise model.
What it did
The touring show reached more than 50 cities by 2019 and the Zagreb museum drew over 1,000 visitors a week. The European Museum Forum gave it the Kenneth Hudson Award in 2011, and donors kept sending objects — around 200 arrive by mail each year.
What you can take
A universal emotion can become a format: give people a ritual to name a loss, and they supply the raw material themselves — the audience becomes the collection.
Since then
The permanent Zagreb museum opened at the Kulmer Palace in 2010 and won the European Museum Forum's Kenneth Hudson Award the next year. The touring collection continued to grow, visiting more than 50 cities worldwide, and in 2016 a second permanent home opened in Los Angeles. Donations still arrive by mail, about 200 objects a year, keeping the museum an ongoing public archive of breakups rather than a one-off exhibition.
Sources
- Tokens of broken dreams in a museum to the end of love
- Lovesick on Valentine's? Museum of broken hearts has the antidote
- Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.
Your turn
You just read one. Describe the brief you are staring at, and see who has been given the same problem.
Free account · 3 free questions · no card