Stories That Made Us - Roots, Resilience, Representation is a new immersive exhibition which travels through the life of a single South Asian family in Coventry across a period of 40-plus years. Created by Hardish Virk and his sister Manjinder, from Hardish’s personal archives, the exhibition reveals much about their activist father and Punjabi poet mother, not to mention Hardish himself, whose formative years were shaped by Coventry in the 1980s. What’s On spoke to Hardish - and the exhibition’s archive assistant, Shaniece Martin - to find out more about this multi-generational project...

A dynamic new exhibition at Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery & Museum traces four decades of a single South Asian family in the city - and in doing so illuminates the wider South Asian experience in Coventry and beyond.

Created and co-curated by Hardish Virk, Stories That Made Us - Roots, Resilience, Representation traces the Virk family’s time in Coventry from 1968 to 2010. Using sound, film, photographs, music and literature, the exhibition creates an immersive environment and explores the lives of Hardish, his parents and siblings.

It’s an idea that has been a long time in the making - the product of a life spent collecting personal items, memories and stories.

“In 1996 I had this idea of opening a living museum of South Asian stories,” explains Hardish. “It was a tangible response to this archive I’ve been building since the early 1980s - a response to the lack of nuanced South Asian stories that I was seeing.”

Organising the archive and ensuring that the artefacts were securely preserved - after years of being stored in cold, damp conditions - was a huge job.

“I started to transport my archive from my house, from my loft and garage, into this space. I spent months working through it, pulling it out of boxes and bin bags - spending time to place it in a space where the environment was accessible.”

Shaniece Martin was brought on board as the project’s archive assistant, to help unpick stories from the available items - and the existing Virk Collection of photographs.

“My relationship has been very much with the Virk Collection in the Coventry Archives, which was donated by Hardish’s father in 2004,” says Shaniece. “My relationship was getting to grips with that collection - understanding who his father was and all the activism he was a part of, and also what that represents about Coventry.”

The exhibition is surrounded by three timelines which span the walls, offering context for the time and place of each era. The Virk Family Timeline anchors the story, flanked by timelines of British and Western history, and South Asian history, to provide historical and cultural touchstones.

“I did a lot of research for the South Asian timeline,” says Shaniece. “For me, being of South Asian culture, it gave me a nuanced look on it, making me realise how long we’ve actually had a presence in the UK. My understanding comes from my grandparents, who migrated here from Kenya in the late 60s, so it was great to [realise] that, actually, we’ve been here a long time.”

Indeed, the fact that South Asian history and British history have been entwined for centuries is something which Hardish was keen to convey in the exhibition: “Often the conversation, particularly around young people, is ‘We don’t know where we belong.’ But also we’ve got people of my parents’ generation who feel like their story started in the 1950s and 60s. What I was very keen to say - and this is what the living museum is designed to do as well - is that our story goes back at least 425 years, and we’ve contributed to every facet of British life.

“I come from a theatre-making background, and from the outset I always said that this needs to be a theatrical experience and exhibition, not a static one. At the heart of it, there’s a human story, a family story. Visitors find their own story in the family story - the frame around this is this timeline of facts.”

Having first travelled through a clinical passport office, visitors to the exhibition are then met with a very different setting: the Virk family living room, complete with sofa and TV. None of the rooms are invented - they’re all replicated from photographs in the Virk Collection.

“The spaces of comfort,” explains Shaniece, “like the living room, the sofa, the bed in the bedroom - that was all to make it feel real and immersed, like a living space. Without those objects, you can’t get that sense of the space at all - it [would feel] like a standard exhibition. But it doesn’t, because there are so many layers that make and recreate those spaces.”

Shaniece, who never met Hardish’s father, Harbhajan Singh Virk, has grown to know him through her exploration of the archives: “It made me recognise the importance of these objects and the archives. Other people would call it hoarding, which we really don’t think is the case. It’s about collecting. I feel like I’ve got to know the people in the process, through those objects and the stories that come alive through those objects.”

Hardish has one eye on the future and the possibility of creating a whole living museum representing South Asian experiences. After initially toying with the idea of repurposing a terraced house for the museum, he now hopes to find a warehouse space in which he could create a similar effect, but in a more accessible environment.

And this is just the beginning...

“Digital methods of making archives and living museums accessible to the world are really important. We’re going to have a drone that’s going to go through this exhibition, and that’s going to make it available, digitally, to the world. I’ve already been thinking about AI technology, as well as VR technology… I really want to talk about how personal archives lend themselves to living museums in lived spaces, and how we use new technologies to make them global experiences and highly accessible.”

With so many fascinating objects represented in the exhibition - collected and preserved by Hardish - it’s hard to pick just one which best represents the whole. Shaniece’s selection is an item which illuminates an experience shared by many. Hardish’s choice, by contrast, is deeply personal.

“I think for me it would be the passports,” says Shaniece. “When Hardish showed me those passports, I remember thinking about the film in the passport-control room… I remember watching that video, seeing those passports and thinking to myself: ‘That’s exactly the passport my grandparents had; that’s exactly the journey that they went through.’ Without the physical passport, there wouldn’t be a trace of that journey.”

“There’s a clock in the living room,” says Hardish, in talking about the single item which he would select as being most representative of the whole exhibition. “And that is the clock from that era in the 1970s - you can see it in the photographs. That clock has sat through nearly 50 years of our family life. If it had a brain and eyes, and had all the senses, it would have listened to and watched these men congregating in that living room, reciting poetry, talking about the anti-racist protests, drinking whiskey and listening to music.”

Stories That Made Us - Roots, Resilience, Representation shows at Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery & Museum until Monday 25 May

By Jessica Clixby