A RECENT episode of BBC TV mockumentary series Twenty Twelve, which makes merry with preparations for the 2012 Olympic Games, featured an appearance by the real-life Lord Coe – the man tasked with putting on the games via the Olympic Delivery Authority, the same organisation so perfectly satirised in the comedy.

Well, at least we can see that Coe has a sense of humour.

But you have to wonder what he would make of the exhibition Games People Play, which, taking the 2012 games as its inspiration, features artworks dealing with capitalist greed, manipulation, ugly nationalism, England's 2011 riots and Chinese civil rights issues.

The show has been organised by ArtCore, a not-for-profit group which started in India in the 1990s but has its UK base in Derby.

Taking the 2012 Olympics as their lead, artists in the UK and India were asked to come up with work which reflected the athletic event or the other kinds of games which people play in public or private.

The show has been curated by teams in India and the UK and one of the points of interest is the similarities and differences in themes and styles explored by artists from the two countries.

The UK art is mostly by artists from Nottingham and the region and it is, by and large, both physically bigger and more adventurous in form than its Indian counterpart.

The local contingent is also noticeably more politically confrontational. Nottingham's Paul Matosic, for example, weighs in with a big photoshopped image which aims a toxic dart at the high cost of the Olympics to the detriment of other areas of society.

Here, the words "The National Lootery" hang over a background of 2011 rioters and riot police.

An adjacent image by Matosic features a javelin-throwing athlete, his javelin pointed straight at a phalanx of police riot shields.

UK artist Clay Smith has a direct pop at China's Olympic record, showing a painting which alludes to Beijing's Bird's Nest stadium and carrying a quote from a Chinese lawyer about the evictions which took place to make way for its construction. Behind the smiles, he says, were "tears, imprisonment, torture and blood". The painting, says Smith, is about "the structured mess of politics within the Olympic Games".

Roll on, London 2012.

But other artists have chosen to reflect on other kinds of games. Pauline Woolly shows two photographs from an area of Mexico where, she tell us, the local women run and play an endurance game over hundreds of miles which involves throwing sticks through small hoops... while wearing sandals made of old car tyres.

In Sarah Brighty's painting The Game Of Life, the game is the lottery of talent and abilities handed out at birth.

Two of the Indian paintings portray Indian cricket supporters, their faces painted in the national colours, and relate to the way international sport has become a legalised form of aggression and national one-upmanship.

This achieves its clearest expression in Sharath Kulgatti's two paintings – one pitching an armed soldier against the background of an aggressive sportsman, the other showing a mushroom cloud.

But there's also a nice appropriately Anglo-Indian moment in Mervyn Mitchell's photograph of an Indian family of four on a single dangerously overcrowded motorbike.

This might seem like a dicey game of luck to outsiders, says Mitchell, but Indians he met on the roads take their chances because it is God's will if they are to die that day.

Games People Play can be seen until April 27