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RESERVOIR presents 2nd World: Where the Gods Left the Mountains, a solo exhibition by Katharien de Villiers at RESERVOIR in Cape Town.

There’s a persuasive deviance to the way Katharien de Villiers, through harnessing visibility of form and encouraging invisibility of meaning, invites her viewers to traverse borders between worlds. There’s an even more compelling curiosity when her work has taken, as its primary source of inspiration, the physical and cultural landscape of the Kyrgyz Republic – an immeasurable hinterland of sorts, visual snippets of which de Villiers has gathered together to inform 2nd World: where the Gods left the mountains.

Working predominantly with her own mobile phone photographs – made on a recent trip hiking through the towering peaks of Kyrgyzstan’s Tien Shan mountain range – de Villers has expanded these images to suit her desired proportions, a process intentionally managed, she says, to enable a visual and narrative reinvention. Printed onto flag fabric (a sure nod to the gargantuan Kyrgyz national flag, which catches the wind boastfully above the head of mighty Manas eternalised in bronze on a grey city square in Bishkek), de Villiers further de-contextualises her subjects by metamorphosing the scaled-up images into paintings of her own record.