Curated by Valerie Connor and Fiach MacConghail, The Car called the Manager was a 'drive-through' exhibition. It took place in the grounds of the College Farm with six numbered cassettes as audio guides for the itinerary. Each narrative lasted about four minutes, so you could experience all six different stories within a half hour or so.

Driving in to the show, you chose a cassette and as the narrative unfolds, you're arrested by the spotlit image of a vintage car. Cruising slowly past it, adjusting to the story's events on your own personal soundtrack, you're drawn into archive film footage projected on your right. Then you're enticed forward towards another car on the right, and you notice flickering lights in an overhead window inviting other stories, before you arrive at the rear gate, to return the cassette and drive round to begin another narrative.

It's a complex and engaging show. Hand draws together local and national narratives, exploring the car's role in the War of Independence, playing with diverse narratives in Irish history. These range from an attack by Republicans using a yellow Rolls-Royce, to a killing near Gort, Co. Galway, to recollections of the life and times of a local entertainer and the days of the travelling players, to yet another describing the local Gordon Bennett race in 1903, where only five cars finished the race. In this latter story, when we hear about the race "coming down the Castledermot straight," Hand drives home the lure of local placenames. This sense of place is also echoed in his positioning of signposts with intriguing names such as Bohernabeaky, Warpspasm, Riarstradh - drawing you into further puzzles, tugging at ideas about the translation of place-names, local geographies and how local spaces are shaped.

The exhibition includes a series of Irish photographs from the early decades of the 20th century, featuring the car as a central prop. Viewing these in the slaughterhouse, the chill and the intensity of the past recreated in the present, prompts questions about the people, places and violent events that brokered the formation of the Irish state. The images include IRA intelligence photographs, recalling the camera's persistence as a tool of surveillance, with other photographs seeming to celebrate both the new State's identity and the car's centrality as the ultimate narrative machine of modernity.

By animating the locations of local and national histories, Hand engages viewers but also seduces them into performing their own roles as readers and makers of meanings - offering a more complex experience than those peddled by the many vacuous slide-shows of the heritage theme-park package.