Seán Lynch’s Dreamtime Ireland calls to mind the work of another artist called Seán hailing from Limerick – Seán Keating, specifically Keating’s painting An Allegory, that hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland. Painted to chronicle the Irish Civil War, it depicts six people around a pine tree, in the shadow of a burnt-out Georgian mansion. On the left, a businessman and priest are in negotiations, while on the right, a pro-treaty soldier and an anti-treaty soldier shovel in unison, burying a coffin wrapped in the Irish flag. At the centre, a mother feeds her baby while a father figure appears slumped against the tree, despondent – all future hope lies with the child wrapped in white.

Like Keating’s painting, Lynch’s exhibition seeks to articulate what Ireland is, a century into the future. The Georgian mansion, or ‘big house’, reveals itself twice within Dreamtime Ireland – the first and most obvious iteration is the architectural model of Ravensdale Park, which, like the house in An Allegory, was set alight during the Irish War of Independence. In the exhibition, its miniature is covered in claw marks – over the decades in storage, it became infested by rats. On an adjacent wall, The Seven-Headed Hydra of Limerick hangs – a photograph of the only known stone carving of the serpentine monster in Ireland. In the familiar Greco-Roman myth, each time one of the monster’s heads is slain, two grow in its place. This myth of regeneration, or the idea that we can never be truly rid of something, reverberates throughout Dreamtime Ireland. In some versions of the story, the monster is finally defeated by burning the stumps of its heads. But what do you do with the ruins of a burnt-down house?

Upstairs, Yvonne McGuinness’s film What’s Left Us Then asks this question. It features the former site of Rockingham mansion in Roscommon, where, in the 1970s, architect Jim Fehily designed a brutalist reimagining of a round tower – six stories high and cast in bare concrete. The film recounts how the Molurg Tower was set to be the first structure in an expansive scheme that could not be realised after the introduction of planning permission laws, which, ironically, Fehily himself helped to draft. These rules become bent when necessary – the exhibition’s other architectural model, a flashy casino and conference venue called The Sonas Centre, proposed for a north Dublin site, was exempt from planning regulations due to the income it would generate for the state, with its touristic appeal and the promise of 2,000 jobs. The Sonas Centre model also includes plans for a mock stone circle, between a large water feature and a car park.

Bureaucracy and capital, as agents of modernity, surface throughout the exhibition, at odds with the bardic spirit of the Celtic tradition, which they simultaneously seek to harness to conjure up a national identity. In Léann Herlihy’s The Long Internecine Quarrel, the artist fabricates state apparatus through the use of harp-branded mugs, pencils, and mousepads. The line, “The artist is simply pottering,” gestures to the technocratic view that art is not worthwhile or productive. Wood Quay Excavation Set, an artwork by Richard Collier, recalls the Viking settlement found at the riverside site marked for development into city council offices. Taking the form of an archaeological play kit for children, it signals that history is a hobbyist pursuit – not something that can contend with important administrative work. Public outcry and a subsequent Supreme Court case resulted in Wood Quay being granted National Monument status. The legislation in question, designed to preserve cultural heritage, granted local authorities special powers over monuments in their area. In this case, the relevant local authority was Dublin City Council.

To return to Seán Keating and cloth, towards the end of his life, the painter was interviewed at Rosc, a series of large-scale exhibitions widely credited with introducing modern and contemporary art to the Irish public. In an archival clip, he looks disapprovingly at Swiss artist Eva Aeppli’s La Table. An interviewer asks him, “You don’t think it could be an allegorical piece?”. Keating replies, saying it’s monstrous and unskilled, “There is no technique – what did he do but get a lot of drapery and tie it up in a few old wigs and distort them?”. Dreamtime Ireland probes similar hostile reactions to modern and contemporary art in Ireland. Reconnaissance and Delivery (Waterford Parachute Project) saw artist Paul Gregg plant a series of test tubes attached to bright orange parachutes with Cyrillic lettering in different locations across Waterford town in 1998. As members of the public encountered the artwork over the course of a day, responses grew increasingly irrational and absurd. Gardaí, Met Éireann, local and national media outlets and eventually the army bomb squad were called to the scene. A television set in the gallery plays an RTÉ News segment which misreports that the parachutes fell from the sky.

Lynch’s singular artwork in this exhibition, Adventure Capital, documents the lifecycle of Uniflow – a public sculpture by artist John Burke, rendered in the style of international modernism. Constructed for a Cork housing estate in 1988, the abstract metal artwork became a vessel for the surrounding community to express social ills. In serving as a meeting place for teenagers, the sculpture facilitated underage drinking; its shape and vibrant colour enticed children to climb on it, giving way to a situation where they would cause grave harm to themselves should they fall from it or be impaled by its sharp edges. Following collective action from residents, the artwork was banished. Lynch presents photographs of the buried artwork, uncovered in a mound of dirt on the outskirts of Cork. The embrace of modern art sought to project an image of a sophisticated and forward-thinking nation, to give Ireland a seat at the same table as its European and American counterparts. Yet the superstitious and reactionary responses such art objects have engendered offer a glimpse of the pagan undercurrents beneath contemporary life on this strange island.

Aisling Clark is a curator and writer based in Dublin