Superbia, in a north Dublin terrace, is a gallery with a difference, writes Aidan Dunne

The Coultry estate is a complex of two-storey terraced houses tucked away just off Ballymun Road. It is overshadowed by Ballymun's better-known, rather more imposing blocks of residential housing, and so it is also in the centre of an area that is being not so much regenerated as comprehensively recreated. Just down the road is the bright, airy new civic centre, as well as impressive-looking new housing developments.

Until September 27th Coultry Gardens in the Coultry estate is the site of one of the projects that form part of Breaking Ground, one of the most ambitious arts commissioning initiatives attempted under the Per Cent for Art scheme.

No 11 Coultry Gardens, just vacated by its residents, has been turned into a gallery, and an exhibition, with a difference. Curators Stephen Brandes and Brigid Harte have invited a number of artists to take a look at the house and place or make a piece with it in mind. That is, with its domestic interior, still carpeted, wallpapered and tiled, in mind. Then there are the associations attendant on ideas of family, domesticity and suburbia. So the project's ironic title, Superbia.

The term, and the witty presentation of the show's catalogue in the style of an estate agent's brochure, is a barbed reference to the hollowness of the suburban dream which, though widely discredited, still persists as the dominant model of domestic housing development in the wider Dublin area.

Inside No 11, the notion that the project is at least in part a commentary on the conventions of habitation and family is reinforced by the way the work both accommodates itself to the grain of domesticity and simultaneously goes against it.

Pretty quickly, in fact, you get the sense of a dark underside to the conventional image of home as haven and playground. This is a little surprising in that it wasn't what Brandes had in mind when he thought of the exhibition. "That is the way it's worked out," he says. "But really we let the artists do whatever they chose in relation to the space. In the event, quite a few of them do seem to have gone that way."

None more so than Nick Lassing, responsible for the show's centrepiece, a large, ornate chandelier that hangs in the stairwell. It's a notably flamboyant adornment to an unpretentious terraced dwelling, but that's not all there is to it. It periodically, and noisily, vibrates as though disturbed by some unseen and perhaps uncanny force. In films a vibrating chandelier virtually symbolises a haunted house, so we're used to the image when we see it. We know what it means. Atmospherically the effect is very powerful and colours your view of the space.

It was Lassing's piece that sparked Brandes's interest originally. "What happened was that I saw it in quite a different context, in the New Contemporaries show a few years ago in England. I thought it was good in an art gallery setting, but I immediately wondered what it would be like in a house." Now he knows: it is very effective and quite unsettling.

Even more unsettling is another of the strongest pieces, New York artist Joyce Pensato's nursery bedroom installation.

Having negotiated the chandelier you open the bedroom door onto a scene of fierce disruption. Huge cartoon images have been painted onto the walls in dripping black paint applied with a wide brush. Black paint is splashed liberally around. Stuffed toys are spilt out over the floor. The head of a huge painted cartoon character looms over the empty baby's cot.

While Pensato's cartoon characters are the stuff of cheerful fantasy, their wild, outsize presentation as graffiti daubs here gives them distinctly sinister connotations. The disarray of the abandoned room recalls notorious real-life events, including the murder of Sharon Tate, as well as many fictional moments in horror films. But there is also something of the darkness of fairy stories about the work, an intimation of the shadows that lurk behind the brightness of childhood.

Pensato, a veteran of the New York art scene, is unfazed by the disturbing aspects of her installation. "What I'm aiming for is the feeling that someone has mugged the room. That they've come in and just mugged it."

In this, she had picked up on elements in the surrounding streetscapes. She spent days getting a feeling for the place before setting to work on transforming the nursery. "To me it seemed like parts of the South Bronx around here, there's a similar quality. But the most important thing is the support I've gotten. Everyone has been incredible. The local people have been so co-operative."

As for the plumbing, there are dark connotations there as well. There is an obsessive-compulsive quality to the way the bathroom has been overwhelmed with towels, each studded with pairs of eyes, and beneath the basin the pipework seems to have sprouted into a tangled organic labyrinth - all the work of Isabel Nolan. Someone has apparently been flushed down the plughole and is trapped deep below the kitchen sink in Samuel Rousseau's video installation, a variant on a well-known video piece by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. Laura Gannon's motto, stamped onto the kitchen wall tiles, suggests the way the experiences and feelings of the inhabitants can be imprinted on the fabric of a house.

Pupils of Ballymun Senior Comprehensive School have provided the photographs that are fixed to the wall above the living room fireplace. Boisterous, good-natured, social images, they may distract you from Hans Op de Beeck's contribution, a framed image sitting atop the mantelpiece.

It's a family portrait, and it is a video. The family - parents and children - is perpetually, anxiously hurrying towards us, but never getting any closer, never getting anywhere at all.

It's not all negative. Just inside the front door, in an installation by Ruth Shaw, a spyhole offers us a view into an exotic, impossible room, a fantasy space that is compellingly real. This and several other pieces refer to the way domestic spaces offer the chance to develop inner, imaginative space.

In a child's bedroom, besides bunk beds and drawings in colour and black and white by Sarah Mangan, accurately evocative of that childhood phase of enthusiastic creative outpouring, Darragh Hogan's wishing well is like a portal into limitless imaginative worlds.

Shane Cullen's carefully ordered grid made up of CD covers, featuring German 1970s progressive rock, encapsulates a phase of adolescent discovery in which the heady excitement of finding alternative views on reality is combined with the anorak's pedestrian list-making. But here again the security of domesticity provides the base from which to explore other realms.

Malachi Farrell's bedroom installation could be read in a similar way. He takes the electronic fittings from standard domestic appliances and refashions them into an anarchic animated figure.

Meanwhile, as in many houses, flickering away in the background is the television in the living room. Onscreen, Matei Bejenaru's video portrait of his home city looks half-familiar, half-strange. There are echoes of Ballymun in the images of blocks of flats and the expanses of blank, in-between spaces, but it is somewhere else, not Ballymun: it is a region of the eastern Romanian city of Iasi.

• Superbia, at 11 Coultry Gardens, Ballymun, Dublin 9, is open Thursday to Sunday noon-6 p.m. or by appointment on Tuesdays and Wednesdays (086-3181169 or 01-8421144) until September 27th