The most innovative European museum!

The Museum of Broken Relationships, one of the newest museums in Zagreb, has recently been proclaimed as the most innovative European museum of 2011. It received the coveted European Museum Forum (EMF) award but as for what makes this Zagreb museum the most innovative, you should find out for yourselves.

Visitors who have already had the opportunity to visit Zagreb’s Museum of Broken Relationships will not be surprised to learn that the museum was recently proclaimed as one of the most innovative European museums of 2011. It received the coveted award from the European Museum Forum (EMF), despite fierce competition. This year, 34 museums from 15 European countries were nominated and Zagreb’s Museum of Contemporary Art was among the nominees.

As the name implies, the Museum of Broken Relationships is a place where visitors will find that they are not alone, in an interesting way: through other people’s sadness. However, it is not a place where sadness lingers for long. The Museum of Broken Relationships consists of an array of knickknacks that goodhearted donors from all over the world forever decided to remove from their homes, thoughts and hearts. The exhibit area covers some 300 square meters and it is divided into several main themes: a room of breakup announcements, a room of passion, rage and fury… Overall, the exhibition consists of some 100 items that vary from the bizarre to banal and unique, such as stuffed toys or much more expensive jewellery and wedding dresses, as well as some decidedly unusual ones, like an old axe.

The exhibition keeps growing, however, as the visitors themselves can participate in creating and expanding the exhibition. Everyone can bring along an item, gift or memento that reminds them of a former, broken relationship. This, in fact, is how the museum first started, four years ago, when its founders embarked on a world tour with their original concept. Since then, they have completed 19 successful tours in America, Europe and Asia; thus, the exhibits that are now permanently on show in Zagreb truly originate from the entire world. Even more interesting, its founders, Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić, were partners themselves once, but their breakup and a painful division of mutual material memories did not result in sadness but, on the contrary, a unique and original job!