With the Kenyan General Election only a few weeks away, the timing of a current exhibition could hardly be bettered.

Featuring drawings, etchings and mixed media works, it takes as its brief the ways in which political power is leveraged. It is manifested often covertly, sometimes unashamedly in your face, to ensure that the merry dance of the many being governed by a fortunate few continues.

Called Proximity to Power, it is part of the Goethe Institut’s programme of presenting innovative contemporary art from Nairobi, and is being shown at the Circle Art Gallery in Lavington until August 12.

The Goethe tends to encourage art with a message, art with a social conscience — art that bites.

It was they, you will remember, who presented Peterson Kamwathi’s seminal show Sitting Allowance, in 2008; an exhibition of large charcoal drawings focusing on various institutions (the press, the police, election officials, politicians and hospital staff) involved in the disputed 2007 General Election in Kenya.

It was also the show that effectively cemented Kamwathi’s reputation as one of the region’s most important Second Generation artists, and helped to launch his international career.

It is no surprise that the combination of the Goethe and elections sees Kamwathi again in the frame, this time as one of the four artists presenting Proximity; the others being Longinus Nagila and Martin Onyis, both rapidly growing in authority, plus the exciting newcomer Nicholas Odhiambo, now based at the city’s Brush Tu studio.

In terms of quality of execution it would be hard to put a hair between them, although it is Kamwathi who takes the most unexpected view of his subject. His contribution accepts the gallery as an integral part of the artwork with some 80 cutout faces drawn in graphite and glued to the wall. Before them stand six ballot boxes made of welded steel.

He played a similar trick at the Frost Museum in Miami when cutouts of demonstrators, some holding placards, were stuck to the wall, their backs to the viewers who therefore became part of their protest.

Here at the Circle, his faces stare out at us, with viewers separated from them only by the ballot boxes. We are all voters, we all hold power in our hands, but will we use it wisely?

Called Six Piece (I and II), Kamwathi’s exhibit refers to the phrase being used to encourage voters to choose six candidates from a single party, which he fears will create political monoliths damaging to transparency, social justice and accountability.

A second installation, called The Society of Spectacles, is by Martin Onyis, who employs two reclaimed doors, etchings, casts of skulls laid on soil plus the chalked testimony of people who survived previous poll outrages.

The doors speak of belonging. If allowed entry you are part of the group, be it family, tribe or party. On them hang etchings of a machete and an AK47, implements of power, and the faces of those yet to be admitted, their lack of focus adding to the universality of a fate to be decided.

The skulls on the soil before the doors tell their own sad story about land rights and refer back to the testimonies of past iniquities.

This is a powerful piece, neatly encapsulating a vast and sprawling subject while offering an unsettling reminder of what can happen when people lose all sense of justice, balance and reason.

From The Society of Spectacles, by Martin Onyis. PHOTO | FRANK WHALLEY

Longinus Nagila shows four small manipulated photo prints with highlighters, Descent of Monuments, that reveal political monuments in the city (the Kenyatta International Convention Centre, the Jomo Kenyatta statue nearby, the parliament clock tower, and the Nyayo Memorial) sinking into piles of garbage and scrapped cars.

The symbolism is simple, effective and beautifully realised — a nation’s pride collapsing in decay.

And then there is Odhiambo, with three strong drawings — Persuasion, Twist and Turn, and Untitled — all graphite on paper that, “explore the relationship between so-called leaders and their followers” (and here I borrow from the excellent catalogue that accompanies the exhibition.)

Figures, bandaged like mummies, twist, crouch, curl and in one drawing stand attentively around the gigantic chair that features in all three drawings — the seat of power, perhaps.

To grasp the scale, imagine a dining chair in your home and each figure would be around 30cm tall. Leaders and followers alike gambol around the seat but ultimately are indistinguishable.

I think we are meant to walk away from this exhibition, sensitively curated by the artist and blogger Thom Oganga, nodding thoughtfully and peacefully demanding free and fair polls with transparency, accountability and all the rest of it.

But if like me you tend to tire a little of these NGO-laden expectations — entirely valid and worthwhile though they may be — you could enjoy the exhibition hugely just for its formal content.

Here is Kamwathi’s stunning ability to draw 80 faces and make each one tellingly different; there the grace of Onyis’s etchings and his haunting assemblage; there too the elegance of Nagila’s sinking monuments; and also the crispness of Odhiambo’s figures and chairs against their sonorous backgrounds.

For no matter whoever wins next month’s election, this is a very fine show indeed.