Objects donated by strangers, each with the story of the relationship it survived. Far better than it sounds.
Two Zagreb artists, Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić, broke up. Joking about what to do with the things they had accumulated together, they came up with a museum, and then they actually made one.
It began in 2006 as a travelling installation, went around the world collecting donations wherever it stopped, and settled into a permanent home in the Upper Town in 2010. In 2011 it won the Kenneth Hudson Award for the most innovative museum in Europe.
How it works
Every object was donated by a member of the public, anonymously or not, with a written account of the relationship it came out of and how that relationship ended. The museum displays the object and the text.
The objects are almost always mundane. An axe. A wedding dress in a jar. A toaster. A pair of furry handcuffs. A bottle of tears, evaporated. A prosthetic leg.
The texts range from funny to genuinely devastating, sometimes in the same three sentences, and the museum makes no attempt to sort them into moods. You go from a caption about a man who kept his ex’s toaster out of spite to one from a mother in Sarajevo, and you are given no warning.
Why it works
Because it is not only about romantic break-ups.
There are objects from people who lost a parent, left a country, came out to a family that did not want them, or survived a war. The Balkan submissions carry the 1990s directly and without commentary.
The museum has been criticised occasionally as a novelty, and it is easy to describe in a way that makes it sound like one. It is not. It is a very well-curated collection of first-person writing about loss, using objects as an excuse, and an hour in it will affect most people more than anything else they see in Zagreb.
Practical
It is small — a few connected rooms in a baroque palace. An hour is enough and rushing it defeats the point.
Admission is charged and is modest. There is a café attached which is good, and a shop selling erasers labelled “bad memories” that manages to be funny rather than cheap.
The displays rotate, because donations keep arriving. You can submit an object yourself; there is a form.
Not suitable for young children, less because of content warnings than because the entire experience is reading.
Around it
It is in the middle of the Upper Town, two minutes from St Mark’s and the same from the Croatian Museum of Naive Art. All three can be done in a morning.
More Museums
Mimara Museum
A vast donated collection with a genuine question mark over how much of it is what it says it is.
Museum of Contemporary Art
The biggest museum in Croatia, across the river, with a working slide down the side of it.
Croatian Museum of Naive Art
Paintings on glass by farmers from a village in Podravina, and the only museum of its kind in the world.