THE amplified sound of a ghostly door creaking out across Parnell Square marks the beginning of each cycle of Hilary Gilligan's forcible, well- executed installation at the defunct National Ballroom.

The piece was created as a pilot for Dublin Corporation's "strategy to encourage temporary public art in the city".

If, future projects in the series Were to be equally successful, the scheme would not only go a long way towards compensating for the rash of kitsch civic statuary erected in the city over the past few years but also strike up some rewarding conversations with the architectural and social history of Dublin.

Gilligan's commission was to create a work for the forecourt of the Hugh Lane gallery and the exterior of the ballroom. Her decision, however, was not simply to decorate the buildings (although she did partially repair the ballroom's impressive neon sign), but somehow to expose their lives and, through that act, those of the city.

In a window in the ballroom's facade a floating figure in Georgian costume appears as the sound of chamber music comes from a speaker. Slide images of a woman - the artist in various costumes, accompanied by various pieces of music - begin to dance across the window frame, suggesting at times the work of James Coleman as they cross-fade between different poses, mixing comic close-ups with distant shots that leave the dancer apparently floating in the darkened room.

The music gives the work a sense of nostalgia, but Gilligan's fascination with the past is a dark one. Even though the piece centres on music and pleasure, on going dancing, a sense of profound desperation, of loneliness and eventually claustrophobia permeates the piece.

Only women appear, and some words spoken during a central section (perhaps, by the sound of big band music, set in the 1940s) hint at a society of two jagged parts, of two genders, maniacally segregated.

With a bigger budget, the ballroom might perhaps have been a little more haunted, with dancers in all its windows.

Equally, however, the gaping windows, touched only by the bursts of fluorescent lighting that signal the piece's end and reveal the rooms' contemporary fittings, offered a pledge that in some form the dance is not over yet.