The ‘invisible war’ is the term used by the historian Benjamin Stora (2001) to describe the decade of terror that unfolded in Algeria between 1992 and 2002. In doing so, Stora identifies the key site of his inquiry: the media coverage – print and audiovisual – in France and in Algeria and the manner in which images of the violence were politically manipulated in ways similar to that of the war of independence (1954–1962). Paradoxically, at the outset of the ‘black decade’, newspapers and television screens were the privileged forms of media used to show acts of atrocity as well as public confessions of guilt by presumed terrorists, resulting in waves of violent images circulating in the spaces of everyday life. According to the journalist and writer Salima Ghezali (2010) it was not so much the absence of visibility that was problematic but the absence of anything that could give meaning to these atrocities.

The excess of real violence and the paradoxical presence and absence of images has led the critic and art gallery curator Nadira Laggoune to wonder about ‘Le mutisme des peintres ou l'indulgence du silence’ (2003: 27). This silence, she explains, was in part a result of the reluctance of painters to become politically engaged when faced with the double sanction of state and Islamist violence. Questioning the ‘silence’ and ‘invisibility’ that surrounded the representation of the ‘civil war’ prompts us to examine the conditions that inform the representation of history in artworks produced in Algeria and France between the beginning of the ‘civil war’ and celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of independence. This chapter reflects critically on the political and material conditions that bear upon access to, and the use of, images, in particular archival images, relating to Algeria's past. This return to the archive by Algerian artists relates to a need to make sense of Algerian history.

Indeed, the ways in which artists draw upon the archive allows them to explore it as an institution of power that legitimizes the state (Foucault, 1969; Derrida, 1995) and also the relationship between the archive and art. As Downey notes, the turn to the archive by contemporary artists in the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa) is symptomatic of a critical approach to history (2015: 14) which, in the context of an authoritarian regime or revolutionary situation, constitutes an act of resistance.