This year's Dublin Fringe Festival marks the swansong of the City Arts Centre building on Moss Street.   Aidan Dunne reports

After an unsettled period, it ceased to function as a multidisciplinary arts centre at the end of 2001, at which point City Arts embarked on its ongoing Civil Arts Inquiry under the guidance of Declan McGonagle. The building has now been sold. Apart from serving as a venue for a number of Fringe performance events, the building has been given over to a series of site-specific installations, most of which refer directly or indirectly to its history as a community-arts institution (the umbrella title Haunted covers both performance and installations).

That history extends back to 1987, when City Arts took the unusual, ambitious initiative of buying the building with the help of the Arts Council, U2 and a substantial bank loan. Louisa Sloan's rather brilliant, elegiac installation Matinée is an ingenious reprise of the many individuals and organisations who have played a part in the activities of the centre between then and now. It takes the form of an endlessly unfolding role of credits projected onto a screen in the basement - and it comprises a formidable line-up.

Moss Street is extremely atmospheric, nowhere more so than in the labyrinthine basement, with its strange shapes and low ceilings. This part of the building housed the sound studios, and the walls of a former office adjacent to the studios are thickly covered with cuttings and publicity material, its musical history. Sloan's piece appropriately occupies one of the studios themselves. Open the door into another and you're confronted by Comfort, James Flynn's installation. He has collected old pieces of foam cushions from public spaces and arranged them so what you're looking at is, rather chillingly, a series of tombstones, a graveyard.

Katrina Maguire has transformed another studio by making a stylised version of a formal garden, a parterre. By laying out circular transparent containers filled with a variety of dried herbs and spices, she has incorporated the skewed architecture of the room into an intricate pattern, like a Persian carpet. In evoking the extraordinary in the ordinary, she refers to the transformative magic that takes place in the creative use of the studios.

A sense of evanescence, of fugitive traces, informs Frank Conway's subtle installation Breath, which entailed capturing the breath of dozens of people associated with the centre. These invisible tokens of a living past reside for a while in the erstwhile programming office. Nina Tanis takes another approach to ephemerality with How Sweet It Was, in which words spoken by people associated with the centre are inscribed in a bowl of boiled sweets as you enter the building.

Others have taken more aggressive approaches to the fabric of the structure. Jonah Brucker Cohen has arranged a motorised chisel so it bores its way through an internal wall. Rather cruelly, its progress is triggered by hits on the centre's website. Allyson Spellacy and Jeffrey Hatfield's version of Babel is a column of technological and other once-functional detritus that gives the impression of sinking down rather than rising up, like a toxic solvent of waste material.

For Nicos Nicolau the building is already partly dismantled. In cutting away a section of a room it is as if he is offering a glimpse into the future. The tiny model houses that make up Ciaran Walsh's Let's Play have a toy-like innocence until you look closer and realise that they are scarred by fire and time, about destruction rather than construction. Conor McGarrigle's Blog is a work in progress, a piece of documentation and a website that promises to amount to "a personal response to the space and its past".

Haunted is an ambiguous term in the circumstances. The centre's last few years were marked by discord and acrimony, and it is appropriate that there is a jagged, unresolved quality to much of this late coda to its history. Many people who were involved with the centre are relishing the chance to remember it before it succumbs to the wrecker's ball.

Most of the installations in Haunted continue until October 17th. Some of its performance elements will be reviewed on Friday