Slough, the Ninth Biennale for Drawing, explores the genre of drawing in relation to sloughing—one of the most fascinating and mysterious phenomena in the animal kingdom, largely hidden from view. Drawing is the heart and origin of many works of art. At times, it allows us to search for what existed before something came into being—in the raw, prior to form and name. For one, this may be an end point, for another—a beginning that signifies continuation.

Slough is both end and beginning, the dead sign of the living body. Only recently it was an inseparable part of a body, and now it resides between inside and outside, on the threshold between history and that which has not yet been fixed in language. Much like sloughing and the material surplus it produces, drawing and its substrate embody, at once, potential and its realization, body and remnant, the literal and the interpretive