Artist Biography

Photo credit: Polly Brown

Working under the moniker People Like Us, British artist Vicki Bennett has been creating audio-visual collage since 1991. Her extensive output spans music releases, radio broadcasts, films, live performances, gallery installations, 360° immersive environments and online media. Vicki treats collage as a form of contemporary folk art, rooted in the shared materials of mass media and technology. Central to her work is the belief that everything is interconnected, making the notion of absolute originality or isolated artistic ownership both questionable and unnecessary. Through collage, familiar sounds and images are brought into new relationships, producing unexpected meanings that extend beyond the sum of their parts.

Throughout her practice, Vicki has explored how we make sense of the world through the material already around us. Films, music, television, radio and archives provide a collective vocabulary, full of associations that change according to how they are encountered and rearranged. Sampling allows these existing fragments to take on different meanings, often revealing connections that were not apparent in their original contexts. Rather than treating the archive as a repository of fixed objects, her work approaches it as something continually being made and remade through use.

Since 2002, the majority of the People Like Us back catalogue has been freely accessible online. Vicki is a long-standing advocate of the gift economy and open access to cultural archives, demonstrating how self-distribution can create greater reach and longevity than conventional publishing channels. The discography and filmography of People Like Us have been generously hosted by UbuWeb, reflecting a commitment to sharing and cultural circulation that extends throughout her practice. In 2006, she became the first artist granted unrestricted access to the BBC archives.

Radio has been particularly important to Vicki’s exploration of how material can be collected, juxtaposed and experienced collectively. Her long-running programme DO or DIY has been broadcast on New York’s independent WFMU since 2003, continuing a practice of experimental broadcasting that began in the 1990s. Her large-scale radio projects have frequently challenged the boundaries of the medium itself. Radio Boredcast (AV Festival, 2012) was a 744-hour online radio station featuring new commissions and archival material, while Optimized! Expanded Radio (2016) transformed WFMU’s Monty Hall into a week-long online audiovisual radio station, combining live broadcasts, films, performances and audience participation. Later works include the crowdsourced radio project No One Is An Island (2016), the 22-hour commission 108 for Radio Art Zone (2022), and Changing Your Mind for Deutschlandradio. These projects investigate radio not only as a means of transmission but as a shared space in which unexpected relationships can emerge.

The same approach extends to her film and performance work, where familiar images and narratives are separated from their original contexts and made to interact. Notations (2013), a touring film created for live musical improvisation, opened up the relationship between the fixed image and its changing musical accompaniment. Citation City (2015), drawing on Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, reconstructed London through its appearances in feature films, using cinematic fragments to create an alternative geography of the city. Other works include the documentary Nothing Can Turn Into A Void (2015) and The Library of Babel, developed from 2023 onwards as a live audiovisual performance inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ story of the same name. First presented during a three-day residency at Café OTO in London, The Library of Babel explores the relationship between language, cinema, narrative and meaning, allowing familiar characters and images to become detached from their original stories. It has subsequently been presented internationally, including appearances at the Vostell Museum in Spain, WFMU’s Monty Hall, donaufestival in Austria, Other Cinema in San Francisco and wildpop at the Star & Shadow Cinema in Newcastle.

Vicki’s interest in the relationships between images, sound and their surroundings has increasingly taken her work beyond the conventional single screen. Her solo exhibition First Person, Fourth Wall (2020) at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, formed part of the Hallwalls Artist in Residence Project. Gone, Gone Beyond (2021), developed for Recombinant Media Labs’ CineChamber, used ten screens and eight speakers to create an immersive audiovisual environment surrounding the audience. Rather than directing attention towards a single image, the work allowed viewers to encounter multiple simultaneous perspectives while sharing the same physical space. The installation toured internationally, including presentations at nyMusikk Oslo, SPILL Festival, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts and London’s Barbican. This exploration continued with Mise en Abyme (2024), a widescreen, multispeaker audiovisual installation presented at Museu de Aveiro/Santa Joana in Portugal as part of Aveiro’s year as Portuguese Capital of Culture.

The processes of collecting, arranging and making associations are also visible in the structures through which Vicki develops her work. Her mind maps, lists and networks of references form a parallel visual practice, allowing ideas and materials to remain connected without necessarily imposing a fixed hierarchy. In 2022, she presented MIND MAPS: The Art of Vicki Bennett at Sheehan Gallery in the USA and Orfeó Lleidatà in Spain. The exhibition brought aspects of this associative approach into the gallery, revealing relationships between the finished works and the processes through which they emerge.

Music remains central to People Like Us, with more than 50 audio recordings released on labels including Illegal Art, Rough Trade, Soleilmoon Recordings, Discrepant, Sonic Arts Network and Touch. Her 2018 album The Mirror, accompanied by an audiovisual performance, was ranked No. 8 in The Wire‘s Albums of the Year. The retrospective double CD Sharity! Selected Works of People Like Us followed in 2023, and COPIA, the first new studio album since The Mirror, was released in 2024 and subsequently issued on vinyl by Discrepant in 2025. In 2026, Vicki began preparing THE RHiZOME in association with the relaunch of Illegal Art, continuing her exploration of musical recombination, association and transformation.

Alongside her own releases and performances, Vicki has produced an extensive body of commissioned moving-image work for other musicians. This includes films for The The, working with director Tim Pope, and videos for Marc Almond, The Soft Pink Truth and Soft Cell. During 2025 and 2026, her collaboration with Soft Cell expanded considerably, encompassing films for live performances and music videos associated with Danceteria, including Out Come The Freaks, In Heaven (When I Dance With You) and The Rainbow Room, as well as work with JG Thirlwell. These collaborations extend her approach to sampling into dialogue with other artists’ music, finding visual correspondences through association rather than literal illustration.

Over more than three decades, People Like Us has been presented internationally at venues including Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, BFI, Barbican, ICA, V&A, Centre Pompidou (Paris), Sónar (Barcelona), MAXXI (Rome), Venice Biennale, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Sydney Opera House and Centro de Cultura Digital (Mexico City). Vicki’s films have been broadcast on Channel 4, while her radio work has included sessions for John Peel and Mixing It, alongside commissions for WDR and Deutschlandradio. Her work has been commissioned by organisations including Arts Council England, Barbican, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, BBC, PRS Foundation, Great North Run, Sound and Music, AV Festival, Recombinant Media Labs, Sonic Arts Network, Animate Projects, Forma, LUX and Lovebytes. She has held numerous solo exhibitions and participated in international group exhibitions at institutions including HMKV (Dortmund), Hatton Gallery (Newcastle), Sheehan Gallery (Walla Walla), Hallwalls (New York), Edinburgh Printmakers and Pallant House (Chichester).

Vicki is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD in Creative Practice, where her research extends the ideas developed through more than thirty years of sampling and collage. Questions of memory, association, authorship and interconnectedness, long present in her artistic work, are now also explored through writing and research. Her interest in the relationship between human creativity and technological systems reflects a continuing engagement with the tools and conditions through which culture is produced, circulated and transformed.

Her writing has appeared in The Wire, including the 2026 essay Authorship Under Automation?, which examines the changing boundaries between human and machine creativity and their implications for artistic authorship. Her work has also been discussed in publications including Cutting Across Media (Duke University Press), Sensations of History (University of Minnesota Press), Kenneth Goldsmith’s Duchamp Is My Lawyer (Columbia University Press) and Carl Abrahamsson’s Different People (Trapart). People Like Us has been reviewed or profiled in The Wire, Rolling Stone, Frieze, The Guardian, NME, Sight & Sound, Film Comment, The Independent, Record Collector and numerous other publications.

Shorter Bio – Artist Statement
Filmography
Exhibitions and Editions
Selected Performances and Screenings
Commissions and Awards
Talks, Lectures
Discography
People Like Us on bandcamp