Terry Grimley looks at an unusual event reviving a ghostly shopping centre.

Ladywood is one of the most socially and economically deprived wards in Birmingham, yet it's cheek-by-jowl with Brindleyplace and the fleshpots of Broad Street.

This paradox is the hook for Test Bed, an exhibition just opened in and around Auchinleck Square in the now largely vacant 1960s Five Ways Shopping Centre.

It's a strangely in-between place, a kind of expectant ghost town.

The city it was built to serve seems to have vanished into thin air, and yet the regeneration spreading west along Broad Street and north from Park Central surely can't leave it untouched for much longer.

Test Bed has been devised by Friction Arts, an organisation with a lengthy history in socially-engaged arts (the preferred term among practitioners for what used to be known as community arts). Since 2005 it has leased a shop unit, the Curio City Shop, in Auchinleck Square.

For Test Bed it has recruited eight artists who have been given a free hand to make their individual contributions, though connections with the location and its residents provide a unifying theme.

Harry Palmer's Signature, for example, is a series of four short TV documentaries about people closely associated with the area, including the Asian proprietor of a nearby card and gift shop which closed last month after more than 20 years.

For her contribution, Amygdala, Friction Arts co-director Sandra Hall interviewed residents about their greatest fears and then collaborated with photographer John McQueen to visualise them.

Mark Storor has taken over a nearby butcher's shop and created a candlelit environment, Pillow Case 1, around photographs he took of local male volunteers making beds.

"I wanted to do a piece of work that was very gentle," he explains. "There's a beauty and poetry to the rituals of everyday life and I wanted to celebrate that."

The pictures of hands calmly folded on white linen strike quite a contrast with the meat-hooks which are still in place nearby.

Storor, who returned to his native Birmingham two years ago after 26 years in London, works around the country. Last year he ran a project in Essex, driving a vintage ice-cream van and handing out ice-creams in exchange for members of the public recordings songs. The youngest contributor was four and the eldest 88.

He is also running a project in Dorset funded by the Wellcome Foundation and will contribute an installation to Liverpool's Capital of Culture programme.

Perhaps the strangest contribution to the exhibition comes from new media artist Darryl Georgiou, who has also taken over a shop unit. His father used to have a chip shop nearby.

In Looking for Kline Georgiou explores his fascination with the cult 1970s TV series Gangsters, which was virtually unique in its era for having been filmed on location in Birmingham. He has revisited and photographed some of the locations, even posing as one of its characters, The White Devil.

Gangsters writer Philip Martin played this role, taking it over when Les Dawson dropped out at the last moment.

The most startling aspect of Georgiou's Gangsters-inspired work is a virtual reconstruction of the opening sequence, featuring the hero Kline (a former SAS man played by Maurice Colbourne) running through the Queensway tunnel.

Georgiou points out that Gangsters has a hard core of followers aged around 60: "They don't like the programme but they freeze-frame it because it's the only recording of 70s buildings in Birmingham," he explains.

Georgiou, one of Birmingham's most internationally in-demand artists, set up his contribution to Test Bed in between working trips to Vienna and New York.

Lee Griffiths, the other co-director of Friction Arts and curator of Test Bed, explains that the company's philosophy is to work with local communities without compromising artistic quality.

"I went out and selected my artists rather have an open submission," he says.

"We actively head-hunted them. We went for people who were complementary in their different ways and who were at different levels in their careers.

"The brief was really open – anything they liked as long as it was within ten or 15 minutes of the shop and it had to have local people as part of the delivery.

"All the work has been done around here and with people around here. It was all about people and place."

He explains that the company took up the shop as a way of presenting contemporary art outside its usual context.

"It's got a massive low-income, non-arts-audience community on one side and Broad Street on the other. I don't think we're in competition with Ikon Gallery but we want to demonstrate that we can make work of similar quality to the work that goes into a place like that."

Test Bed is a forerunner of Friction Arts' most ambitious project, Reality Estate, planned for October. One of a number of major projects funded by the Urban Fusion programme, it will bring together some of Birmingham's best-known choirs with residents of the Five Ways Estate to "sing Birmingham's truths" to a background of spectacular projections and lighting.

"We've already got an international reputation for high-quality socially-engaged work," says Griffiths. "In Europe, Birmingham is seen as a place that's very cutting-edge. I go to Holland and speak at conferences about stuff we do, but we don't do it here.

"In Europe, they are very keen on finding out how to access people and communicate with people. We are see as neutral, so we can explore all sorts of issues.

"On the estate, we get a lot of respect, whereas someone from the council wouldn't get the same response. They put the dogs in the back rather than set them on us."* Test Bed is at the Curio City Shop and nearby venues until Saturday (daily 1-6pm, admission free).