The deer is a recurrent image in Hilla Ben Ari's works. Over the years she has sculpted its body and antlers in various materials. This time, Ben Ari has taken a "real" stag's ear, a living-dead, taxidermied stump, and introduced a mechanical mechanism to it. By means of new technology Ben Ari creates a demonstration of the ear movement typical to some animal species, a near-negligent phenomenon occurring in nature, reserved to the animal kingdom. This repetitive, neural movement of a small organ generates a fidgety rhythm like ticking.
Separation of the organ from the animal's body and its presentation as a dissociated stump joins the movement, detached from the other body movements, to produce a stumped action. A severed organ, a fragment, might elicit disgust, but Ben Ari's deer ear is swathed in humor and irony.
Ben Ari has stepped into the shoes of the taxidermist, the scientist, and the curator of a natural history museum, who create a display with an added—educational, pedagogical—value. Observation is the common point of departure shared by the worlds of science and art: attention to, selection, exaltation, analysis and public exposure of detail. Ben Ari the artist opts for a tiny element: a single ear of two. She places it on the museum's white wall, thus marking it as a work of art.