He is a feminist curator and art critic. He was Director of Centro Cultural Montehermoso Kulturunea, Vitoria-Gasteiz, from 2007 to 2011, making it a pioneering institution in the development and application of feminist policies in the fields of contemporary art, thought and culture.

Previously, Arakistain carried out a range of projects, including the exhibition Trans Sexual Express (1999) which incorporated the sex quota as a curatorial criterion, and which explored the cultural construction of the categories of sex, gender and sexuality in the production of art in the Basque context of the time. In 2000, along with Rosa Martínez, the exhibition was expanded to include other contexts, and it was shown in other venues. Between 2001 and 2003 he was in charge of the paritarian programme at the exhibitions hall of the Fundación Bilbao Arte Fundazioa, and, from 2003 to 2006, he directed the debates on art and feminism at the forums of contemporary art experts at the ARCO fair. In 2005 he headed the Manifiesto Arco 2005, which demanded that public administrations adopted practical measures to implement equality between the sexes in the field of art, which was seconded by a great many women working in this sector and inspired the article 26 of the Spanish Law of Equality. Xabier Arakistain has also curated retrospective shows devoted to the U.S. collective Guerrilla Girls and to the British artist Leigh Bowery, as well as the shows Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, 86 steps in 45 years of Art and Feminism (Museo de BBAA, Bilbao), Para todos los públicos (Sala Rekalde, Bilbao) and Switch on the Power (MARCO, Vigo; C. C. Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz; CAM, Gran Canaria). At Montehermoso he has curated exhibitions such as The Furious Gaze (co-curated with Maura Reilly), Living Together. Estrategias para la convivencia (co-curated with Emma Dexter) or What I See. Susan Hiller (co-curated with Beatriz Herraez). Additionally, Arakistain has given lectures on his work and on the relationship between art and feminism at the Tate Modern, the Royal College of Art and the UCL in London, the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the MUAC in Mexico City, the MNCARS in Madrid, the EHESS in Paris, the MAK in Vienna, the Universidad de las Islas Baleares, the UPV/EHU or the UCLM. Xabier Arakistain took a degree in Social Sciences and Media Studies at the UPV/EHU, with a research paper on sex, gender and sexual identities in film, and also holds an MA in Film Studies from the same university.