In "Plot for a Biennial," the title of the 10th edition of the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates, the word plot can be understood in at least three senses: a space, a narrative, and a conspiracy. The show, for example, comprises several spaces, sprawling across a number of sites in the historic center of Sharjah, where modern high-rises mingle with century-old buildings constructed from coral. Oddly enough, spreading the event out produces an especially intimate experience, as one strolls from one area to another, asking directions from locals, engaging with the city in a way that would be impossible in neighboring Dubai and improbable in tourist-infested Venice. The sandy streets of Sharjah radiate calm as well as heat, although the works on view fairly shiver with the pent-up energy of the Middle East at a revolutionary moment.

This feeling of intimacy, particularly intense during the opening (which was attended by nearly all the participating artists), infuses the other two senses of plot with a special urgency. A narrative and a conspiracy are both types of stories: the former of what has happened — or what one imagines to have occurred — the latter of what a group of people intends to happen. Here's what did happen. At the press conference, Sharjah Art Foundation director Jack Persekian dedicated this Biennial to "the spirit of change" sweeping the region and to the young people inspiring and leading the revolutions in the Middle East. That same day the UAE, along with Saudi Arabia, sent troops into Bahrain to quell the increasingly violent uprisings in that state, where seven protesters were killed.

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The following day, at the formal opening of the Biennial by Sharjah's ruler, Sheikh Dr. Sultan Bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, a group of artists and curators performed a brief action to highlight what had occurred in Bahrain: They passed out sheets of paper printed with the names of the dead and, for an instant, held those names in front of press cameras. This in no way disrupted the opening. Nor, unfortunately, did the detention of the artist Ibrahim Quraishi, one of the few nonwhite participants. Quraishi was taken to a police station, where he claims he was interrogated for some five hours, but he was ultimately released unharmed. The tension between the freedom of art and the need for order, whether in the form of prevailing mores or political calm, pervades the exhibition.

Conceived as what Persekian called a "platform for experimentation" — a sort of grand conspiracy to stage artworks — this Biennial would feel political even if it weren't occurring shortly after the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and during upheavals in Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. But the current context focuses the content like a lens. The inclusion, for instance, of Harun Faroucki and Andrei Ujica's 1993 "Videograms of a Revolution," a chronological assemblage of video footage from the 1989 overthrow of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, seems more pointed and more vividly pertinent now than it must have back when the curators chose it.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi, who teaches miniature painting and contributed an engaging suite of micro-scaled works, also splashed red emulsion over the square courtyard of one of the exhibition buildings to create "Blessings Upon the Land of my Love," an extraordinary site-specific installation that when seen, say, from one of the structure's upper floors looks like a pool of dried blood, and when viewed up close resolves into an agglomeration of red flower paintings. Needless to say, given the unrest in the region, the sanguinary dominates over the floral.

Qureshi's piece resonates with another in the same building, the Damascene artist Hrair Sarkissian's "Execution Squares," 2008, a series of 12 photographs of execution sites in three Syrian cities. The artist took the pictures early in the morning, when executions usually occur but also when the squares are empty. Six months ago these images might have appeared as mournful rebukes; today they spark and crackle like a lit fuse.

Although focused, the exhibition has been endowed by its organizers — Suzanne Cotter, curator of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project; Rasha Salti, creative director of ArteEast; and Haig Aivazian, a Chicago-based independent curator — with a conceptual apparatus so loose it hangs off the show's structure like a pair of too-large pants, threatening to fall away entirely. It's organized around the concepts of "Treason, Necessity, Insurrection, Affiliation, Corruption, Devotion, Disclosure, and Translation." And it's plotted like a film script, a fact evident almost exclusively in the fine catalogue, which is divided into six "scenes" instead of sections or chapters. The bagginess of the conceptual framework in no way hinders the success of the Biennial as a whole. Indeed one suspects that the curators left things vague because a tighter framework might have resulted in a less various, and less exciting, selection of work. It might also have retarded the proliferation of stories and conspiracies that snake through this garden of delights.

That most of the narratives fall under the overarching rubric of politics might surprise those who imagine that Sharjah, the most conservative and traditional of the emirates, would seriously curb freedom of expression. In fact, the limits set — tacitly, as far as I know; the artists were not asked to adhere to specific strictures — allow for robust political dialogue. What are the limits? Certainly offense to religion is out of bounds, and one artist, the American Caveh Zahedi, had his film barred for blaspheming Islam. Nude pictures would also be considered offensive here.

Persekian speaks to this issue in the catalogue: "Artists come forth with ideas and proposals for projects that lie beyond the conventions of religion or dominant culture. In such cases, the artists' challenge lies in confronting censorship, which may be imposed on them by the topical or local framework of the Biennial. But this challenge beckons them to create a framework for participation and dialogue that is in accordance with local culture. Dialogue then becomes the point of entry into the work, instead of artists' imposing their views, habits, conventions, and liberties or restrictions on the Biennial."

A few of the participants chose to conduct a dialogue with the notion of censorship directly. For instance, black squares reading "Please Be Aware This Image Contains Nudity" cover strategic pictures in the four large collages that make up Ramin Haerizadeh's "Beware of This Artist," an otherwise unremarkable 2010 installation. Choreographer Omar Rajeh's performance "Mushrooms and Fig Leaves," with the Maqamat Dance Theatre, goes beyond Haerizadeh's simple acknowledgement of censorship, pushing at the issue like a bulge in a Speedo. X-rays of offending areas of the body are affixed to the Plexiglas wall that divides the audience from the stage, from which male and female performers aggressively thrust bare elbows, knees, bellies, and clavicles — all supposedly verboten — at the viewers. The Emiratis seem to accept these visual arguments with equanimity.

Sex and Islam are understandably dicey subjects here. Far more latitude seems given to political works. Amar Kanwar's "The Torn First Pages," 2004–08, explores repression by Burma's military regime in a 19-channel video projected, to gorgeous effect, on sheets of paper hung by binder clips.  The 2011 film "United Red Army," part of the Bangladeshi artist Naeem Mohaiemen's ongoing research-based work targeting the ultraleft's utopian dreams, creates a gripping historical allegory by splicing together 1977 recordings of negotiations between a member of the eponymous Japanese terror organization, which had hijacked a plane to Dhaka, and the control tower there.

No place, however, in the political geography traversed in this Biennial — from Kashmir to Lebanon to the Arab suburbs of Paris — is examined more closely than the bit of turf fought over by Israelis and Palestinians. The two groups come together in the Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency, which conspires, through a variety of media, to reinhabit settlements and military bases that would be emptied with the end of Israel's occupation of the West Bank. Jane and Louise Wilson, along with Shumon Basar and Eyal Weizman, chase the conflict back to the UAE in "Face Scripting: What Did the Building See?," an enthralling 2011 film installation that "ghosts" the forensic footage used by the Dubai police to investigate the assassination there of the Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Among the most affecting works are those in which individual voices bear witness to the stories of a community, such as "Al Jaar Quabla al Daar" ("The Neighbor Before the House"), 2009, by the Mumbai-based collective Camp. In it Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem tell stories about, and comment on, their neighborhood as they and we observe the area through a security camera.

Camp's video is an example of an oblique approach to politics employed by a number artists here, an approach also exemplified by Tom Molloy's 2008 installation "Subplot." The piece's 117 framed drawings contain all the pages of George Orwell's "1984" but display only the text referring to a particular subplot: the love affair between Winston and Julia. Subplots, or rather the stories behind the politics, also form the basis for an extraordinary work by the Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili. "The Mapping Journey Project," 2008–11, consists of eight videos running simultaneously, each recounting the story of a person's departure from a Mediterranean country. We see people's hands tracing their route out of, for example, Tunisia into Libya and from there to Italy as we listen to them intimately describe these often terrifying peregrinations, the humiliations they suffered, their detentions and escapes. Listening is also demanded by the women who populate Judith Barry's ghostly projections "Cairo Stories...", 2010–11. You come across them in odd places, the face of a woman on the wall of a souk, outside the men's lavatory in another market, each telling her tale, giving voice to women's lives in that Egyptian city that suddenly became central to lives around the globe.

Barry's piece, like so many others in this bazaar of plots that has taken over Sharjah, is about the projection (and reception) of culture. And isn't culture the sub-subplot of politics, the ground soil from which the affairs of the world spring? How we understand another culture and how we present ours color the relations between those countries. Watch the ways that the Egyptian actress Soad Hosni is portrayed over the course of her 82 films and you will learn a story of Arab self-perception and how it informs Western perceptions of Arabs. That, at least, is the hope of the Lebenese artist Rania Stephan, who in "The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni," 2011, constructs an extraordinary montage of the actress's work.

Listening to and reading all these stories of politics, subplots, and cultural projections — be they the hilarious vignettes of the Lebanese collective Atfal Ahdath or the poignant tales found in the notebooks kept by artist Yto Barrada's illiterate grandmother so she could identify her grandchildren — heightens your comprehension not of the Middle East or its politics per se but rather of people as people. These stories, these plots, conspire to bring you closer to others regardless of their ethnicity, and it is for this reason that the 10th Sharjah Biennial is such an intimate experience.