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. It’s a practice of fragmentation, and while clarity of form pervades 2nd World – layers of textured fabrics enshrine an image of wild horses running; a stuffed bird pierces the fourth wall with its bright, synthetic gaze; a man, chambering his gun, looms large before a haze of yellow light and an acid green fan – there is little consensus among what these paintings might depict (except, strikingly, Cyrillic script, glimpses of which add, to a non-Kyrgyz viewer, a heightened sense of the extraordinary at play). A sofa and armchairs, too, blanketed in elaborate patterns, sit beneath postered sportsmen displaying their athletic physiques – concrete beams overhead at odds with this otherwise vibrant scene. How should such forms, such scenes, be understood then? For de Villiers, this is entirely the point; their interpretation secondary to what their distillation might bring. An adherent of decontextualisation, de Villiers’ subjects, whether figurative or interior, are not what she is asking her viewers to primarily consider. Rather, in her navigation of a borderlands between original and inspired reality, de Villiers has expanded hybrid, liminal spaces so that their contours and character – where otherwise assumed – might become known. It is here, after such contours have been made visible, that de Villiers turns to narrative. Steeped in nostalgia and glamour (“My subjects inspire a feeling of old-world luxury meets new-world plastic and desire. They are haughty and enviable.”), the tone, she says, is set by Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita – a Faustian tale of sorts, the details of which are irrelevant here. Rather, through a meticulously administered yet fragmented record, 2nd World works to resist a shallow homogenisation of interpretation and to struggle, instead, for potentially richer understandings of the many physical and cultural geographies with which we share a world, and from which we might be othered. “Assume not,” her works seem to declare; “for magic lies not in knowing but in the uncertain act of seeing!”