Imagine yourself stark naked, and your body will immediately curl up with uneasiness. Even in dreams, when we see ourselves bare, we wake up and think, ‘That was weird.’ We don’t talk about nudity or express it—it makes us feel embarrassed and ashamed.

This is the very notion ‘20 Shades of Nude’ challenges. The exhibition at Mcube Gallery, curated by Kapil Mani Dixit and Manish Lal Shrestha, questions why we think of nudity as something obscene and vulgar, despite it being the natural form. The exhibition promotes both uneasiness and comfort: uneasy to see everything naked and out there, yet comfortable enough to talk about nudity and sexuality, like everything else, because it is natural.

On the gallery’s ground floor, after opening a locked door, one enters a dark room that explores various forms and ideas of nudity. The first installation you see is of Vijay Maharjan, which tells of the beginning of the human world, with Eve biting an apple. His sculpture is headless, and one of its hands is in the form of a snake, while an apple rests above the chest as the snake hisses past it.

On the wall next to this is Jupiter Pradhan’s visual installation titled ‘The tide,’ which expresses contested freedom—nude silhouettes of people dancing on the beach, with the resonating sound of the water. But everyone knows, outside this context, nudity is perceived as indecent. Pradhan’s idea, although impressive, feels clunky. His installation, particularly the video, exudes the feeling of being carefree, but the rest of the elements feel rough, lacking finesse and the rawness he wants to depict.

Another mixed media installation, with multiple artworks, placed in unmatching alignment one after another, by Anjila Manandhar expresses ‘Nudity to be displayed’. Her subject in the artworks is bare feet—which is a relatively mundane piece of the anatomy we see every day; it is the only form of bareness society is willing to accept. Manandhar also places minute ants all over the wall near the feet, and around a human wooden sculpture, as if to express the itch we feel when we think about nudity. Imagine ants climbing up your legs, and the eerie feeling that makes you wince—that is what brings you closer to the idea behind the artist’s work.

The curatorial set up of the gallery also expresses a lot on the theme ‘nudity’. On the first floor, the whole of the room is covered with cloth, making the ambience of the room dark and shabby. And the purpose of it could be to make the audience feel the nudity we closet, the suffocation, the inhibition that we tie with feeling naked. The room shows how deeply we hide ourselves, how we have taught ourselves to inextricably linking nudity with profanity. The room captures our conscious decision to wrap our nudity, to never express it or go beyond the conventions of society—it makes you feel like our nudity is our greatest secrecy that we protect from everyone.

In contrast, the top floor of the gallery is exposed to light and stresses the need to normalise the idea of nudity. It’s open and free and has nothing to hide. Here we are comfortable watching the nude forms of diverse human bodies with various artists taking the opportunity to shed light on various issues related with nudity, like self-love, body image, breast cancer, breastfeeding, sexual pleasure, the human body as art, nature, freedom of expression.

Bhairaja Maharjan’s four square paintings by the sea, of islands shaped as different human postures, also naturalises the idea of nudity. His art information reads, “Nature is always nude.” There’s also Sangeeta Thapa’s charcoal and chalk sketches of nude models that tell of how artists are nurtured into seeing the beauty of the human body. Her work is raw, simple and relatable. In one of her drawings of nude models, one can also read the model’s nervousness, perhaps awkwardness, which shows the model standing straight, his body tight with tension and his hands almost trying to clench into a fist.

One of the most memorable artworks from the series, however, is ‘Nudity of Breast’ by Rashana Bajracharya. Bajracharya focuses on the most prominent part of the female body: her breasts. She brings forward the beauty of it by showing a hand of a baby reaching out to a mother’s breast, then a lover’s hand trying to caress it and lastly a doctor’s hand checking for lumps. The three square paintings have traces of flowers perhaps representing softness, love and the beauty of the body part. Bajrachaya’s expression of nudity is poignant, and her work delves deeper on the trauma of going through breast cancer. She touches on the theme’s profundity, giving details that do not stigmatise nudity, by not saying much and yet saying so much.

However, there are also works that feel quite absurd in the series, like that of Sundar Lama’s pencil drawing titled, ‘Coconut Bandage.’ The work shows a man’s torso with the head of a horse, with birds resting on his bareback. On both sides of his torso are two buildings that look like the Ghantaghar. There’s an ear stuck to his buttock, while his legs have tattoos of flowers. There’s an incomplete cloud, and to its right is a bird in a circle out of nowhere.

There’s also the work of Asha Dangol, which showcases a 10-headed deity wearing oxygen masks. Although the body of the being is uncovered, it's still hard to process how the work celebrates the natural human body. It also feels odd that the work is priced at Rs 700,000. Same goes for Roshan Mishra’s work, ‘Identity Underneath’; although what he wants to express is powerful, we are left questioning how nudity is related to gender identity and sexuality. His piece is engaging and pops out with the use of colourful underpants. But his idea feels misplaced in the narrative of nudity and celebrating the human body. More because he dresses our nudity with clothes again, undoing what he wants to do.

But on the whole, '20 Shades of Nude', which brings together works of 20 artists, is an exhibition that is interesting and engaging. While some works are easily forgettable, there are works worth mulling over, and these are works pertaining to issues of violence, mental health, disease, human anatomy, equality and freedom. Perhaps exhibitions such as this one will encourage people to be more open and expressive about the bare physical form, without the sexual and obscene gaze.

‘20 Shades of Nude’ will be exhibited until 3 March, at Gallery Mcube.