The Brittania Pan­op­t­i­con­ is a building with a long and storied history. It began life as an anonymous warehouse - no one is quite sure when - before ar­chi­tects Thomas Gildard and HM McFarlane tran­s­formed it into a music hall in 1857, adding the familiar facade and, inside, a pro­s­cen­i­um arch and tightly packed stalls.

The tran­s­form­a­tions continued apace, with the advent of moving pictures in the late 1890s, and, once im­pres­ar­io AE Pickard took over, a programme that added freak shows, waxworks, the amateur talent contests that saw Stan Laurel make his stage debut, and even a zoo to the playbills.

Its name has changed over the years too, from the rather un­im­a­gin­at­ive Campbell’s Music Saloon to the glor­i­ously eu­pho­n­i­ous Hubner’s An­im­a­to­graph, not for­get­t­ing its current nickname, the Pots and Pans.

And, though the music hall closed its doors in 1938, as the appeal of music hall faded, the building continues to entertain, with its lower floors home to a bustling arcade, and the crumbling aud­it­or­i­um playing host to per­for­m­ances and screen­ings arranged by the vo­lun­teers of the Britannia Pan­op­t­i­con­ Music Hall Trust.

The latest chapter of the Pan­op­t­i­con­ story comes courtesy of artist Minty Donald, whose Glimmers In Limbo project directly addresses the building’s past, present and future, examining and in­ter­pret­ing its varied uses, and the decaying fabric of the music hall, too.

She has responded with a set of ‘in­ter­ven­tions’, each as layered as the pal­im­psest of the Pan­op­t­i­con­.

‘It was daunting at first,’ Donald admits, ex­plain­ing the genesis of her project, ‘and really hard to know how much to do. It’s such a busy space, with such a lot going on - the displays of the building’s history, the decay upstairs, the arcade down­s­tairs. I felt un­com­fort­able doing to much.’

This un­wil­l­ing­ness to overstep the mark has resulted in a series of in­stal­l­a­tions, per­for­m­ances and pro­jec­tions that share an air of un­der­stated eloquence.

Against the rear wall of the aud­it­or­i­um sits Shoebox Archive, 600 white shoeboxes piled up in stacks. Some contain artefacts Donald found in the building - ever­yth­ing from rusty safety pins to scraps of celluloid - and, when opened by visitors, light up to reveal their contents. Others are empty, and visitors are invited to leave artefacts of their own. ‘I’m trying to get people to really engage with the space,’ Donald explains, ‘and the piece is also a sort of memorial to the space, which at one point was a shoe warehouse.’

Donald has also engaged with the Pan­op­t­i­con­’s faded exterior. From the street below, passers-by will be treated to projected an­im­a­tions, turning the upper windows into a giant fruit machine. ‘Instead of fruit,’ Donald says, ‘letters spin in the windows, sometimes they resolve into words, sometimes they don’t.’ Like the shoebox in­stal­l­a­tion, Facade Fruit Machine is packed with allusions to past and present alike, the let­ter­forms based on signage that has adorned the building over the years, the rolling drums a nod to the arcade that occupies the ground floor. That too has been tran­s­formed, with pho­to­graphs of the dil­ap­id­ated ar­chi­tec­ture inside, in­ac­cess­ible to the public, displayed like estate agent’s par­t­ic­u­lars in the arcade window.

The heart of the show, though, is a per­for­m­ance, and the traces it leaves. Last night twelve singers performed ac­com­pan­ied by a pianola, its reels made according to piano ar­range­ments by Giles Lamb of Savalas. For the remainder of the show, re­cord­ings of the event will play out, with selected lyrics projected onto the hall’s walls, an in­stal­l­a­tion which Donald calls ‘a ghost of a per­for­m­ance’. ‘I’m not trying to recreate the old-time music hall,’ she says, ‘so all the songs were chosen as a personal response to the building. Some fit perfectly: the Orange Juice song Wan Light has the line, “There is a place which no one has seen, where it’s still possible to dream.”.’

That com­bin­a­tion of personal response and un­ex­pec­ted resonance seems key to Donald’s work, which looks beyond the specific history of the Pan­op­t­i­con­. Glimmers In Limbo is part of an ongoing research project, with a second stage due to interact with another Glasgow building with a rich heritage and uncertain future, the Tramway. ‘I’m in­ter­es­ted in asking questions about the goals of site-specific projects,’ Donald explains, ‘and about the spaces people are deeply invested in, looking at the built en­vir­on­ment in terms of memories and emotions, not just bricks and mortar.’ In­ter­ac­tion and in­volve­ment are, too, central to the project. ‘It’s really important to me that people par­t­i­cip­ate,’ Donald says, ‘We can keep writing histories, and rewriting them, even falsi­fy­ing them.’

The result of this deep thinking about places and spaces, and the way artists can respond to and transform them, has re­ju­ven­ated the Britannia Pan­op­t­i­con­, and looks set to draw in a new audience, an effect that will last beyond the end of Glimmers In Limbo’s run. It seems fitting that, given time, Donald’s careful, thought-provoking work will become another story, another memory attached to the Britannia Pan­op­t­i­con­.

This preview was first published in The Herald on October 19th, 2007.