Visual Arts: The House of Osama Bin Laden is a catchy title for an exhibition, one guaranteed to capture attention. Look further and find that it promises a "virtual tour" of Bin Laden's house in Afghanistan and it becomes virtually irresistible, writes Aidan Dunne.

Reviewed: The House of Osama Bin Laden, Irish Museum of Modern Art until February 8th. IMMA is closed on Mondays and December 24th-26th (01-6129900).

There is a house and there is a virtual tour, but A House . . . would be a more accurate, if less enticing description.

Osama Bin Laden is thought to have lived in the house is question, in eastern Afghanistan, from May 1996 to September 1997.

Now, it's a distinctly des res, a modestly proportioned but spectacularly located bungalow, with adjoining bunker and mosque and extensive views of lake and mountain, overseen by militia but apparently unoccupied. The computer simulation and the virtual tour are provided courtesy of English art partnership Langlands & Bell - Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell - who travelled to Afghanistan in October last year under the provisions of what used to be known as the War Artists scheme. As with Paul Seawright, whose photographs of Afghanistan were on view at IMMA until recently, they were on a research commission for the Imperial War Museum in London.

Langlands & Bell sounds like the name of an advertising or PR firm; Langlands & Bell in person look very much like a couple of advertising executives, and a great deal of their work has the slickness of advertising about it, none of which is accidental.

That's the world they live in and the world they deal with, in its own language. Their specific interest is in the way people relate to architectural environments or, if you prefer, in the way architectural environments in all their complexity function in relation to the people who inhabit or employ them. So their exploration of Bin Laden's erstwhile dwelling is a logical, if relatively sensational, extension of their usual practice.

They clearly had a busy time in Afghanistan. The high point was their perilous trip to the location of the house, at Daruntah, west of Jalalabad. There, they gathered as much material as they could, using a still and a digital video camera, and taking measurements, until the militia on guard became suspicious of their motives and made them stop. Nevertheless, they certainly had enough to put together a high quality three-dimensional computer simulation, with technical help, back in London.

The abandoned house contains only a few remnants of habitation: a stripped single bed, a rug, some weapons and ammunition. The bunker, constructed in part from empty ammunition boxes filled with earth, does not look that sturdy at all. It's all very bright and cheerful, and the views are stunning. In one published interview, the artists speculate that Bin Laden may have planned, or partly planned, September 11th in this remote and beautiful place. When he moved in 1997, it was reportedly because American agents were closing in. The point of the whole exercise is of course his highly charged absence.

He's not there, but he haunts the consciousness of the West.

Yet the modest, prosaic nature of the place, and of the work, militate against our notion of him as pretty much the most famous or infamous absent presence in the world.

It's a highly effective piece. Langlands & Bell produced a great deal more work based on their trip to Afghanistan, and some of it is also on view as part of their exhibition at IMMA. It includes a short film edited down from footage shot during a trial at the Supreme Court in Kabul.

It is called Zardad's Dog, the nickname given to the man on trial for his life, Abdullah Shah. Apparently a lieutenant for a more powerful warlord, Shah is charged with numerous murders during the country's long years of civil war.

He earned his nickname from his alleged practice of biting his victims before killing them, mostly as he went about his job of collecting tariffs from hapless travellers. If they couldn't pay, they died. The courtroom rituals and procedures could have come, the artists say, from Biblical times, and the building itself, grand though austere, is striking. Shah is found guilty and sentenced to death, but a caption tells us that he has two remaining chances to appeal.

Zardad's Dog is essentially a piece of informal documentary, and while it is certainly interesting as such, to catch a glimpse into another judicial culture, the visual quality is not great. There is more of a sense of visual structure on the other main strand in the show, inspired by the proliferation of signs denoting the presence of NGOs (Non-Governmental Organisations) including the United Nations and others, throughout Kabul and beyond.

These signs become a way of looking at the landscape for Langlands & Bell, a way of structuring their view of an otherwise chaotic, indecipherable environment. Just as it is difficult for us as outsiders to read the subtleties of what is going on at the trial of Shah, it is hard to know what exactly is going in terms of reconstruction, physically, culturally and politically, in Afghanistan.

In fact, the artists are a bit sniffy about the NGOs, of which there are, on their evidence, a prodigious number. They see them as a sign not just of Western presence but Western domination and say that the Afghans question why they are there at all. The signs they record, in a series of projected photographic images, do not really suggest anything like domination, however. Nearly all of them come across as being frankly encouraging in the context, suggesting a significant level of grass-roots activity in basic, distinctly unglamorous but essential areas. The accompanying animated graphic sequence or acronyms, which suggests a self-contained network of NGOs, insulated from any other context, seems a bit unfair to the people on the ground.