Hues o f Delicacy
14 April — 18 October, 2026
Zaza Ramen, Milan. Italy.
Anila Rubiku. Beyond Hidden Milan
by Irene Sofia Comi
From photographs taken during bicycle tours to miniature drawings and embroidered silk canvases, Anila Rubiku’s The Inner Door, now presented at Zazà Ramen in a renewed form, unfolds as a visual archive, a biographical memoir, and a work of art. Conceived in 2004, the project focuses on a specific subject: the radiant glass panes of Milan’s inner doors. Vibrant yet often overlooked, the secondary entrances of Milanese architecture were crafted between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries by figures such as Piero Portaluppi, Gio Ponti, and Giovanni Muzio, as well as by blacksmiths and artisans. An Italian of Albanian origin, Rubiku first encountered these interstitial spaces during her early years in Milan, where she arrived in 1994. What captivated her most was the luminous quality of the glass panes that form these doors, their hidden preciousness.
Her work reflects both a desire to develop a sense of familiarity with the city and its architectural history, and a search for forms of refuge and protection embedded in hidden places. These historical, cultural, biographical, and personal dimensions also resonate in the sculptures from the series Bunker Mentality – Landscape Legacy (2012), inspired by the forms of the countless bunkers constructed during the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, who ruled Albania’s totalitarian communist regime for more than forty years. In the exhibition, they are displayed on the restaurant’s shelving, which itself marks a threshold to the basement.
While politics and poetics converge in Rubiku’s practice, abstraction and figuration are further articulated through a dialogue with art history. On the restaurant’s first wall, in a constellation of fragmented elements, the artist moves toward a distinctly minimalist approach: sections of the glass door are isolated from their context, and the unified form fractures—in a decomposition reminiscent of Lucio Fontana’s Quanta series (1959–60). On the second wall, she adopts a more pictorial sensibility, meticulously capturing the subtle vibrations of light across the glass surfaces. In doing so, the viewer’s gaze is redirected toward the observation of natural and chromatic phenomena, much like the work of a “painter of light” in late nineteenth-century Paris.
Yet references to art history ultimately give way to the layered meanings embedded in Rubiku’s linguistic and technical choices. The medium chosen for her creations—from 2004, with the performance at the National Gallery of Tirana—has been embroidery, traditionally considered both an act of care and a form of female labor, and also a further biographical note: “The act of sewing is my world. It is my very being. My poetry. My culture.” Since 2025, the artist has complemented this practice with meticulous work in glass beads—a material rooted in Albanian history and shaped by Ottoman cultural influence, reflecting the shimmer of light and carrying a long commercial and colonial history. She learned the technique from the Indigenous communities of Toronto, the city where she works. Through this layered, nuanced process, the works presented in Hues of Delicacy interweave political, social, and artistic dimensions into a delicate tapestry, one that connects memory, the present, and the future.