Some years ago, I had an Italian boyfriend who couldn’t stand to find a hair in the bed. It struck me as bizarre: how can you object to something so inevitable? Hair is part of our lives, whether we’re trying to tame it, remove it, change it or hold on to it. It’s intimate, powerful and political. Across cultures, hair often represents strength, fertility and beauty. It is also associated with the mystical.

During the Inquisition, it was thought that women deemed to be witches could control the weather by unleashing their hair. In Nazi concentration camps, heads were shaved as part of a dehumanising process that stripped prisoners of their identity and culture. But in some cultures, baldness is revered; Buddhist monks and nuns routinely shave their heads.

A new show at Heide Museum of Modern Art takes an ambitious look at the complex significance of hair. Hair Pieces has been a long time coming, says senior curator Melissa Keys; it has been challenging to put together, in part because hair has these very dark associations – but it’s also playful and light.

“It’s kind of nothing and everything at the same time,” Keys says. “It was a process of accepting that it’s actually important to have all of those things in the mix as well, because it’s a bit unnatural to bring things that touch on human atrocities together with some things that are humorous but, in the end, I realised it was necessary.”

Through new and old works across genres by 38 artists from eight countries, the show takes over Heide’s main gallery.

According to Keys, hair is associated with beauty and sometimes with health and vitality, but also mortality. “We associate it with surrealism and the uncanny and the unconscious but it’s also so much more than that. It’s social, cultural and political and an economic signifier as well, and quite often it is contradictory,” she says.

“Hair contains this multiplicity of associations and that was one of the things that really interested me about it – its complexity and the fact that it is very difficult to kind of pin down. That’s one of the reasons artists constantly come back to it.”

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Artist Julie Rrap has used hair in her work in different ways over the years. Hairline Crack, 1992, held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, was made while she was living in Europe, and encloses human hair in a perspex handrail. It was designed to go around a narrow space, playing on architecture and the hairline crack.

She recalls making it and the unruly hair popping out, refusing to stay in place, reminiscent of a bikini line. From a distance, it looks like a wooden handrail but closer inspection reveals human hair inside the glass. “It’s like a line on the wall, it’s several metres long and the hair kind of spills out; it’s slightly sexy in a way, quite funny.

“I had this period when I was living in Europe where I used hair because it didn’t cost anything to get, I’d go to hairdressers and I could just get piles and piles of hair,” she says. “It’s quite a controversial material. It was quite delicate to use it because obviously the history of the war and the Holocaust and all those hideous stories. Culturally it’s also received very differently too, it can have quite magical, potent resonances in certain cultures.”

The weird thing about hair, which Rrap discovered picking it up from hairdressers “is the minute it’s cut and it falls on the ground it becomes this kind of matter”. “It completely shifts gear and becomes something discarded and a bit horrible so it’s very interesting, which is what fascinated me when I was using it. It’s got this quite abhorrent [quality], it can move from something beautiful to something quite grotesque and disconcerting.”

It’s a very potent material, she says, connected to beauty but also the abject.

Rrap’s work often deals with representations of women. The still Horse’s Tale from the series Porous Bodies, made in 1999, is part of the Heide show. “A horse’s tail coming out of my bum,” is how she describes it with a laugh.

Keys describes it as “an equine appendage sprouting from her private domain”. “It’s both titillating and it’s witty, and it’s a parody on the objectification of women throughout the history of art and advertising,” she says. “It pushes up against those patriarchal views of the kind of the monstrous feminine, and rather than recoiling from hair, she’s embracing this idea of women’s natural hirsute forms through that.”

How much hair women should have and where it should be on their bodies is explored in the show. Hair goes through cycles, Keys says, sometimes we embrace it and other times we feel forced to remove it. “Throughout the history of art and culture, of course, it’s always been political, but in the ’60s and ‘70s it really comes to the fore, particularly in the ’70s,” she says. “It was a very hirsute time.”

The late Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta’s work Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants) tackles this very issue. The series of photographs are part of her experimentations during the early 1970s that involved altering her physical appearance through a range of cosmetic interventions. In the series of images, she glues a male friend’s facial hair onto her own face.

“These [works] quite often incorporated hair and wigs, which were employed to question and rupture gender constructions and stereotypes,” says Keys.

The work was also inspired by Mendieta’s fascination with Marcel Duchamp’s gender transformations, such as his female alter ego Mademoiselle Rrose Sélavy.

Wiradjuri artist S.J Norman’s Magna Mater, which comprises 10 video works, is one of the multimedia installations in the show. It features footage of 12 First Nations people who all identify as male and with whom Norman is in kinship. It’s a particularly beautiful work, says Keys.

“The artist asked the participants to document themselves having their hair brushed, 100 strokes each day over the course of the same moon cycle,” she says. “The brushing is performed by caregivers and family and Norman sees the performances as acts of consensual intimacy and care.”

Charlie Sofo with Debris Facility’s Found Combs (2007 - ongoing) is a collection of combs they’ve found on the streets. This work is strangely touching, Keys says.

“This amassed assemblage of personal objects that have been stranded and then reclaimed from public spaces. Most of the combs are worse for wear, they’ve got all these broken teeth and there’s bits of residual hair stuck in them; some are intact, and others appear unused.”

Also included in the show is Australian artist Christina May Carey, whose installation piece looks like a home office setup of mobiles and laptop screens. Hypnagogia displays video of hair being braided. The work is a response to a feeling of disequilibrium, as the distinction between screen spaces and the physical body blur.

Sadie Chandler’s Object II, 1993, shows a mop of hair protruding from a tin can, suggesting women or beauty as a commodity, in a nod to Andy Warhol.

Other highlights include work by John Meade, Louise Weaver, Patricia Piccinini and Christian Thompson, as well as international artists Marina Abramovic, Sonia Boyce and Janine Antoni.

There’s also a humorous work by Chinese/Australian artist Chunxiao Qu, called Wig Shoes. A comment on the use of animal skin and fur within the fashion industry, it asks what if these products were made from you, from your hair and from your skin?

“The fluffy story-book quality of the shoes collides with the artist’s real-world concerns around animal exploitation and harm,” Keys says. “So it kind of draws you in, it’s delightful. And then you realise that it’s actually got a bit of bite.”

Hair Pieces is at Heide Museum of Modern Art until October 6.

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