BMoCA seeks reminders of your once-broken heart for the Museum of Broken Relationships

Maybe you keep it in the back of a drawer or between the leaves of an old journal, or perhaps in a cardboard box in the garage. You don't know why you keep it, but you do, and every once in a while, when you come across it, it screws you up.

You're not alone. Many people keep relics -- some of them silly, some of them serious -- from old relationships: Crackerjack toys and fortune cookie messages, jewelry, photos, watches and other exchanged items that lose their value after the relationship ends. Yet we keep them. Why?

That's the question that Croatian couple Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić left behind after they split up. They started talking about it, and finally collected their unneeded mementos and those of their friends in what eventually became the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb.

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Now they collect cast-off items from around the world, and they'll be coming to the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art for a Valentine's Day opening of a show of relics that will remain on view at BMoCA through the end of May, when they'll be sent on to Zagreb for installation at their global repository.

But there's no point in mounting a Museum of Broken Relationships show in Boulder unless it has a local tie-in, and that's why BMoCA is putting out a call for the detritus of your past. The museum will be collecting items through February 3; visit the donations page online, e-mail or call 303-443-2122,  ext. 10, for information and instructions on how to send in your stuff. Or go to BMoCA online for information about the show.






