The stated goal of the exhibit "Hair Raising" at the Hachava Gallery in Holon is to examine the use of human hair as a raw material. Among the participants is the Studio Swine initiative — a British-Japanese collaboration that through the film "Hair Highway" describes an astounding socio-economic phenomenon. “The studio staff spent five months in China, which is the biggest importer of hair in the world and the biggest exporter of wood. They looked for a way to end the wasteful and environmentally unfriendly system of import and export, and instead to use local products as raw materials,” says Tamara Wolman, who, with Omri Shapira, curated the exhibit, which includes the work of 11 artists and designers from Israel and around the world.

For the exhibit, Studio Swine created a collection of everyday utilitarian tools: combs, boxes and even mirrors. They look like they’re made of wood, but they’re actually made of hair.

Wolman says Israelis' reactions to the exhibit, located in the middle of an industrial zone, have been mixed. It seems that Israelis have a hard time with hair, at least when it’s detached from the body. “Yes, there’s a recoiling from hair because of a psychological-associative factor,” she says, “but it’s good. It opens up the discussion to the question of what happens when you use hair as a raw material, from the standpoint of the observer and the creator. There were visitors who were disgusted at works where hair was really exposed, who refused to touch them. As far as they were concerned, they don’t know where the hair came from, what person it belonged to.” 

Wolman says these reactions accompanied her work on the exhibit from the very start, and have actually become a central part of it. Visitors see paintbrushes made from human hair, jewelry made out of hair and the like. Wolman says that “while the exhibit includes 11 [sets of] works, there should be a 12th work: the documentation of visitors’ reactions — our recoiling at someone else’s bodily products.”