Pink Screens

The Pink Screens Festival exhibition annually showcases new artists and collectives, presenting a vibrant blend of visual and auditory works that thoughtfully explore questions of gender and sexuality. Celebrating its 22nd iteration from November 9 to 18, 2023, Brussels' premier queer cinema event, organized by Genres d’à Côté and Cinéma Nova, featured 13 queer artists and over 100 films from around the globe, offering diverse perspectives that enriched the festival’s dynamic program. Among the highlights was the installation Shimmering Lukas (2022), inspired by Eliza Steinbock's theoretical framework from Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (2019). The work utilized the cinematic quality of shimmering to transform embodiment into a storytelling medium where light, texture, and motion evoke narratives of fluid identity and social visibility. Drawing on water-like materiality—shiny fabrics, sequins, transparency, and fluid draping—the photo series captured Lukas's journey of gender fluidity as both a visual and emotional narrative. By echoing cinematic lighting, the reflective and translucent qualities of the garments reimagined non-masculine male bodies as powerful and beautiful, layering identity and expression with depth and complexity, while using shimmer as a metaphor for evolving selfhood that challenges rigid binaries through queer aesthetics.

‍