ALGIERS: Two video monitors hang side by side on the wall of a museum. Each screen is looping through 52 minutes of interview footage.

The same six subjects are speaking, but there is a gap of eight years between the video on the left and the video on the right. To create the installation “Khiam 2000-2007,” the Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige returned twice to a subject that could not be filmed.

In 1999, they met six people who had been imprisoned in Khiam, the notorious detention center run by Israel’s proxy militia, the South Lebanon Army. At the time, Israel was still occupying a band of villages on the border, so Hadjithomas and Joreige were unable to access the site.

Among ordinary people – neither medics nor military nor diplomatic staff – Khiam in the 1990s existed only in anecdotes, never in images. The six prisoners – including Soha Bechara, who had been jailed for trying to assassinate the SLA boss Antoine Lahd – describe their daily lives in detention, filling the void of visual information with a vivid mental map of isolation and deprivation.

The emphasis of the first film, which was completed in 2000, just as the Israelis withdrew and the detention center was dismantled, rests on the incredible perseverance and ingenuity of the inmates, who found the will to live in the production and trade of tiny, artisanal objects – artworks of a kind in a radically circumscribed world.

After the Israelis left, Hezbollah turned Khiam into a museum.

During the 2006 war, the Israeli Air Force bombed it to smithereens. A year later, Hadjithomas and Joreige interviewed the same six people again – in the second film, they are sadder, less heroic – and again, Khiam did not as such exist.

The return to this twice-made ruin is one of the most explicit articulations of a theme explored in an exhibition that opened last week in Algiers, where “Khiam 2000-2007” is installed alongside a dramatic series of photographs, titled “War Trophies,” showing Khiam reduced to rubble.

“Le Retour (The Return)” is wide-ranging display of works by 26 artists from almost as many countries. There is a towering stack of metal pots by Pascale Marthine Tayou, from Cameroon; one of Mona Hatoum’s rug maps; delightful wall drawings by the Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi; and an elegant installation of prints and videos by the Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili.

Organized by the curator and critic Nadira Laggoune, the exhibition constitutes the third edition of FIAC, the Festival International d’Art Contemporain.

FIAC is the biennial of Algiers in all but name, despite the fact that it has been staged every year since 2009. “Le Retour” fills three floors in the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain d’Alger, a 4-year-old institution known affectionately as MAMA. It isn’t Laggoune’s first exhibition there, but it might be the most promising, for the museum and the city’s art scene at large, which is opening up after a long spell of isolation.

Algeria occupies a special place in the history of contemporary art outside of Europe and United States, which is arguably rooted in experimental film more so than fine art.

After winning a brutal war for independence from France in 1962, Algeria became a hotbed of politically engaged cinema. The winning party, the Front de Libération Nationale, invested heavily in film as a means of carrying the revolution forward. Over time, however, that strategy hardened into party orthodoxy as the FLN – a liberation movement aligned with the likes of Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara and the Black Panthers – turned repressive and authoritarian.

By the time Algeria’s horrific civil war began in the 1990s – after the government loosened up, lost an election by a landslide and abruptly clamped down again – cinema had stagnated. Artists were among the scores of intellectuals targeted for gruesome assassinations by the splintering factions of an increasingly violent Islamist opposition.

In 1994, Ahmad Asselah, the director of Algiers’ prestigious Ecole Supérieure des Beaux Arts, was shot and killed on campus, alongside his son. Many Algerian artists who are now internationally prominent, including Adel Abdessemed, were students then, and took this as their cue to leave the country.

The civil war is never locally acknowledged as such – only as “the invisible war,” “terrorism” or “the black decade” – but Oussama Tabti, a 23-year-year graduate of ESBA, delineates the era with haunting simplicity in his installation for FIAC, titled “Stand By.”

The piece consists of 21 scans of the back inside covers of library books. The checkout pockets are stamped with due dates: 1992, 1993, 1994, then a tortured pause until the dates resume in 2001.

Tabti’s work is one of several on view at MAMA to use the notion of “the return” as an occasion to revisit vexed histories, which might otherwise be taboo or, in the case of Amal Ben Attia’s video “Couvre Feu (Curfew),” shot on a mobile phone in the midst of Tunisia’s uprising last winter, too fresh to fully process. As such the exhibition is a terrific example of politically sensitive material being smuggled into public discourse under the guise of contemporary art.

What makes “Le Retour” better than polemics or a palliative exercise in group-grief, however, is that ultimately Laggoune’s choices are concerned with a return to the imagination, to the life of the mind and to oneself.

Neïl Beloufa’s mesmerizing video “Untitled” may have been inspired by a story the artist once heard about a group of terrorists who occupied an exposed glass villa during the black decade in Algiers, but the work itself pushes far beyond the return of the repressed. Formally brilliant, with an elaborate set made of just cardboard and paper, “Untitled” is a rhythmic, stylized rumination on the relationship between fear and fantasy.

A subtle undercurrent of psychologically probing works on femininity – in Alice Anderson’s evocative video “Prompt Book” and Claudia Casarino’s installation of diaphanous nightgowns – gives “Le Retour” another edge. The exhibition also shows great potential for creating a kind of call and response between Algiers and Beirut on artworks dealing with civil wars.

As such, this edition of FIAC not only returns Algiers to cultural prominence, it also signals a reactivation of creativity and critical thought.

“Le Retour” runs through Feb. 3 at MAMA, 25 Larbi Ben M’hidi Street, Algiers.