Laura Lohiaita: Screen Sieve

Laura Lohiaita’s exhibition Screen Sieve presents a series of experimental black-and-white portraits that explore the invisible forces linked to visual technologies.

The images were created using a technique developed by the artist that harnesses chance. Lohiaita has printed TikTok videos—in which a person speaks or otherwise performs for the camera—from a phone screen onto photographic paper in a darkroom. The videos are transformed into analog black-and-white photographs in surprising ways, distorting the person’s face almost without exception to the point of unrecognizability. Instead of film grain, the prints reveal magnified pixels from the phone’s LCD screen, which create a shimmering moiré effect.

These shimmering, ghostly portraits, created using an experimental printing technique, generate a tension between the analog and the digital, between photography and video, and between the present and the past. The borrowing from social media imagery is not obvious; rather, the visual aesthetics of the images seems to lead somewhere further back into the past.

Laura Lohiaita (b. 1989) is a visual artist based in Helsinki who works within the expanded field of photography and with installations. She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki in 2024. Screen Sieve in Galleria Ratamo is her second solo exhibition.