Hardish Virk uses photography, film, music and his family’s memorabilia to tell a wider story of migration and community resilience

As you enter the living room at the Stories That Made Us exhibition, a stereo plays the Hindi anthem Yeh Dosti Hum Nahi Todenge. It is a ballad celebrating friendship and love from the epic film Sholay. Beside the stereo sits a bottle of Johnnie Walker and a red glass decanter. On the table are copies of the Punjabi newspaper Des Pardes, which translates as “home and abroad”.

The scene, which depicts the childhood home of the Coventry-born curator and artist Hardish Virk, is one of several spaces in an immersive exhibition at the city’s Herbert Art Gallery & Museum. It traces four decades of the experiences of south Asians as they arrived and adapted to the social, political and cultural changes in modern Britain.