Xavier RIBAS

Barcelona, 1960. Lives and works in Cambridge, UK.

Xavier Ribas is a photographer, lecturer at the University of Brighton, and associate lecturer at the Universitat Politècnica de València. He studied Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona (1990) and Documentary Photography at the Newport School of Art and Design (1993). His photographic work investigates contested sites and histories, geographies of abandonment, sites of corporate development and exclusion, border territories, and geographies of extraction. His recent works take the form of large photographic grids, often including text, archive materials, moving image and sound. Since 2012, Xavier Ribas has been collaborating with visual artist Ignacio Acosta and art historian Louise Purbrick on the AHRC funded project Traces of Nitrate.

Ribas has been involved in many international exhibitions and has received awards, commissions and fellowships from the Arts and Humanities Research Council – AHRC (2012-2016, 2017-2018, 2021-2024), the International Photography Research Network - IPRN (2006), Fundación Telefónica (2005), and Commande Publique du Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Centre National des Arts Plastiques (2006), among others. He has also collaborated on research, exhibition and publication projects with the Universidad de Salamanca (1998, 2000, 2009), Universitat Politècnica de València (2008), Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail (2007-2008), Universiteit Leiden (2006) and Universidad de Navarra (2009, 2014-2015).