What kinds of images or metaphors do you reach for when you try to explain how you work? How have they helped you clarify your process? How might the language you use to describe your methods open up new possibilities—or reveal hidden assumptions—in your practice?

In this talk, Deena Chalabi discusses the three metaphors from the title as distinct methodological approaches: topography, or mapping what is visible; stratigraphy, or excavating what is inherited; and cosmology, or orienting toward larger systems of meaning. Together, they offer a vocabulary for working across scales, disciplines, and cultures: from the immediate terrain of institutional and social life, through the histories that shape a given context, to the kind of expansive frameworks that can provide a sense of direction. Deena will discuss examples from her curatorial, critical, and creative work to illustrate how method takes shape acorss these different modes, while also opening space for students to reflect on the framing and vantage points that guide their own approaches to research, writing, and making.

BIO

Deena Chalabi (she/her/hers) is a strategist, curator and writer. Her work explores the concept of legacy, and how individual creative expression and critical thought can challenge dominant narratives, expand collective memory and enhance public imagination for the future. She teaches in the Visual and Critical Studies graduate program at the California College of the Arts and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley. Deena was the inaugural Barbara and Stephan Vermut Associate Curator of Public Dialogue at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and was previously the founding Head of Strategy at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar. She has organized interdisciplinary events about art, literature, culture and politics in several countries including the US, UK and Japan, and has spoken widely on related subjects, including at Stanford University, Oakland Museum of California, Kenyon College, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New Museum. Her writing has appeared in several exhibition catalogues, as well as publications including Bidoun, The New Inquiry, the Journal of Visual Culture and SFMOMA’s Open Space, where she was a columnist-in-residence in 2019. Deena holds a Masters from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and a BA cum laude in Social Studies from Harvard College, where she focused on postcolonial history, theory and literature. She grew up in London, UK and now lives in Oakland, California. She is working on her first book(s).