Lua Ribeira is a photographer who explores themes such as oppression and exclusion, examining the dynamics of the relationship between the oppressed or excluded and the dominant culture.
Ribeira was born and bred in Galicia, and her awareness of the cultural and political repression that the region under Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975) underpins her work. She left Galicia to study Graphic Design at BAU School of Design in Barcelona before gaining a B.A. in Documentary Photography at the University of South Wales, graduating in 2016. Now based in Bristol, she combines her activities as a photographer with lecturing.
Ribeira takes an immersive approach to her work, researching her subjects extensively. Her best-known work to date is Noises, begun in 2015, which focuses on the British-Jamaican dancehall culture. Drawn to the sounds and music, she was also interested in the dance halls as a form of resistance to British colonial history. She examined this culture through extended meetings she had people she met at the dance halls.
In Galicia, Ribeira captured life at two centres run by Catholic nuns for women with learning disabilities (Aristocrátas, 2016), and in Bristol, she carried out a project examining the city’s homelessness crisis (Subida al Cielo, 2017-2018). Further afield, in Tijuana in Mexico, she examined migration at the US-Mexico border in (La Jungla, 2019), and in Melilla, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, she documented migrants attempting to cross the Moroccan-Spanish border.
Ribeira has won many awards and is an Associate member of Magnum. There are two works by her in the Amgueddfa Cymru - Museum Wales collection.
Mari Griffith is an art historian who has worked in the field of museums and galleries for 30 years, developing and overseeing learning and interpretation provision for public art collections and exhibitions, including at the National Gallery, National Gallery of Art and Royal Academy of Arts. Following a period working internationally on art and heritage interpretation, she is now a freelance writer, editor and translator – focusing mostly on art.
