The Ormeau Baths Gallery's annual open submission exhibition, Perspective, has progressively drawn in artists from farther and farther afield.

It's gratifying that this year's selection, by Enrique Juncosa, director of IMMA, includes a substantial quotient of not entirely predictable work by Irish artists, as it is that this year's award winner, Susan MacWilliam, is both Irish and a particularly good choice. She is a good choice not only because she has devised and delivered a characteristic and striking installation but also because she has on occasion been underrated and overlooked.

Here she infuses the aura-free interior of the Ormeau Baths with an air of strangeness in a work that draws on her fascination with the occult and perceptions of psychic phenomena. An approximation of a 1950s US living room frames an evocation of the Indian-born New York mystic Kuda Bux, the "man with X-ray eyes" who convinced audiences he could see perfectly while blindfolded.

There is a typically forensic quality to MacWilliam's assembly and display of the evidence. She relishes the pungency of things themselves, old and musty and steeped in history. Bux's apparently uncanny ability, which speaks to our need for mystery, is subsumed into a culture of entertainment and celebrity.

One hesitates to mention it in case it becomes an issue, but it's notable that, in terms of open submission shows in general, there is a significant proportion of painting included here. What's good about this is that you don't get that sense of something like a fear of painting that clings to some curators.

Paddy McCann's small, straightforwardly representational oil paintings get one long wall to themselves and manage to be self-contained, thoughtful and pertinent. More a series than a composite, they nonetheless have a cumulative force. Many depict empty or functional containers, from masks of Northern Ireland political figures to domestic objects, including a dust bag, a pillow, a leg cast, gloves and a child's copybook. All of this imagery, while visually muted and understated, is charged with implications in the context of Northern Ireland, implications that proliferate with the relationships between the paintings. McCann doesn't harangue us but leaves us to meditate and tease out this for ourselves. His paintings are paintings pure and not so simple.

Natalie Black's promising-looking paintings are compromised by heavy-handed wood surrounds that detract from her collaboration with the composer Rachel Holstead. Both were responding to the landscape of Rathlin Island.

Oddly, there is a corner of the Ormeau Baths that is for ever given over to particularly informal, open-ended installations. This year the space is occupied by Aoife Collins, whose rolled-up paper work is duly and haphazardly spread out on the ground. No group show is complete without someone inventively intervening in existing film footage, and here Elizabeth McAlpine reduces Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now to the seven and a half minutes a viewer would typically miss while blinking throughout it. Which leaves you with a surprisingly coherent narrative.

Sally Timmons also deals inventively with technological ellipses in Message, a very funny video piece in which she records an instructional guide to herself, for herself in the event of subsequent memory loss, except that glitches ensure that every crucial piece of information is missing. Su Rynard's Bug Girl is a technically remarkable video, a compressed Alice's Adventures In Wonderland for the age of genetically modified organisms, impressively well done.

While Ollie Comerford, Mark Curran, Christophe Neuman and others perform dependably, it is worth mentioning one visually dazzling video installation by Giuseppina Esposito. A three-screen projection offers simultaneous time-lapse accounts of adjacent sections of a panoramic shoreline landscape in the north-west. Each section was recorded on a different day. The soundtrack includes informal commentary on the conditions and problems encountered. Is the commentary there because of an embarrassment at the presentation of such an unadorned natural spectacle in the contemporary cultural climate? Possibly, but the work is disconcertingly, breathtakingly beautiful.

If you make your way on foot from the Ormeau Baths to the Fenderesky along Dublin Road, you pass a small unoccupied shop. Apart from the relatively dilapidated facade it exhibits another, startling sign of dereliction: masses of weeds sprouting from beneath. They look as if they might lift the whole structure, shattering and enveloping it like the jungle reclaiming an abandoned city.

This glimpse came to mind in relation to John Duncan's photographs in Trees From Germany, exhibited at Belfast Exposed and extremely well reproduced in an accompanying publication. One of his images records a derelict site on Berry Street, colonised by buddleia and other vegetation, corralled by a rusting fence of corrugated metal embellished with the decaying remains of posters. It's a strangely beautiful natural island set in a sea of grim housing estates and big, brutal developments.

Belfast through Duncan's lens is fence city. Every foot of space is defined and divided. New housing complexes retreat behind locked gates, proprietorial boundaries are echoed by more ominous barriers at community interfaces. Even the landscaped garden courtyards of secure apartment complexes have a regimented, joyless air. Multistorey car parks loom everywhere in the background.

The city under construction inevitably looks theatrical, like a set, something unreal made to resemble something real.

In a way it's easy but a little unfair to point out the flaws in this extraordinary wave of development. We're looking not only at a work perpetually in progress but also at the construction of the private and social spaces of future generations, a point made by the novelist Glenn Patterson in his richly informative text. Duncan's photographs provide an invaluable, critical though never opinionated record.