Donated exhibit at the Museum of Broken Relationships
The Museum of Broken Relationships sounds like a catchy name for a blog or something Carrie Bradshaw might muse about in one of her deep, metaphor-heavy voice-overs. But it’s way more awesome than that: It’s an actual museum. In Croatia. See? Totally awesome. We wrote about the concept a few years back when it was just a traveling collection of items, but now the permanent collection is set up in a sleek white exhibition space in Zagreb. And this year the museum won an award for most innovative museum in Europe (and that’s saying something, given that Europe also boasts the world’s only Phallological Museum).
The concept is this: every item in the collection is an object leftover after a failed relationship (whether the relationship failed because someone was an asshole, or ended because someone died). They range from the cutesy, like a cheap cuddly teddy bear, to the artistic (Venetian glass horse) to the creepy (an axe) to the just plain odd (prosthetic leg). And then there are the items that were once appealing or sexy and are suddenly unbearably sad, like a set of white garter belts, with the confession (by a Bosnian woman): “I never put them on. The relationship might have lasted longer if I did.”
