Vinayak: Babirusa vol. II – Terminal Diasporic

Everything today feels commonplace. We speak yet rarely hear ourselves. We take pride in our aimless wanders but play the cards that were always meant to be played, reading between the same old lines for fear of writing new ones. Imagination has entered its terminal era, and this work is its anti-monument. But the word “terminal” can also mean a passage: a locus of camaraderie, partage, intimacy, where fears are faced and magic made momentarily visible. What happens when a journey reaches a T-junction that forever splits into a binary choice?

Vinayak’s exhibition Terminal Diasporic is a fictional non-place—here, an abandoned parking lot. Its architecture rises from the dissonant din of turbid tercets, from the mercurial movements of human and more-than-human errant bodies, from salvaged traces and many happy accidents. Terminal Diasporic is the second in a trilogy of book-exhibitions titled Babirusa. The exhibition is an exercise in speculative world-building performed through poetic strategies, moving fluidly across the various scales of today’s photography. Drawing from Édouard Glissant’s framework of Relation and his notion of utopia, Vinayak’s works activate vernacular archives gathered from Helsinki’s urban limits and forgotten vestiges of the internet through a series of performative gestures and play. The visual landscape of the show is an amalgamation between Vinayak’s own photography and AI generated images.

The many tales of the past, present, and future of Terminal Diasporic inhabit the walls of this basement gallery, as Vinayak’s works turn it into a dynamic, ruinous, psychotropic terrain that whirls and swims with joy, memory, melancholia, and madness. The handmade photobook-work, patchwork quilts, video pieces, and framed and unframed prints host an array of vignettes and fragments that dream this non-place into existence. Terminal Diasporic acts as both an ode to photography and a scathing critique of it. It is a work of inspired fiction, where photography becomes a language, made by a diasporic artist navigating the menacing reality we have collectively shaped and now inhabit in a search for common grounds.

Vinayak (b. 1991) is from Kerala, India, currently based in Helsinki. Through photobook-works and exhibitions, he gathers, dissects, analyzes, and re-appropriates various tropes associated with the photographic medium and its contemporary condition.

The exhibition is part of the gallery’s 2025-26 program called Textures of Security, which has been curated through an open call by the museum’s curatorial team and invited curator Farbod Fakharzadeh, and supported by Finnish Heritage Agency.