ART : Dina Dar Fashions Her Life’s Fateful Loop Into Art

“A Loop of Fate: Dina Dar’s Odyssey to Jewish Portugal” recounts an artist’s journey into a chapter of ethnic history in a foreign country. But the exhibition, at the Hebrew Union College Skirball Museum (through May 31), resounds well beyond those borders.

“This is more profound than a story about Judaism in Portugal. It’s a search for identity--not just roots in the soil, but roots in the spirit--and that’s universal,” Dina Dar says.

Laboring in a field formerly known as Xerography but now called electrography, Dar is well known for creating images of astonishing fragility and personal insight on ordinary color copy machines. Her current show of 14 works--ranging from single sheets to 20-part grids, measuring up to 5x7 feet--is based on the Portuguese village of Belmonte, where the Jewish community has only begun to emerge after 500 years of suppression and fear.

But the exhibition also reveals the artist’s childhood as a “hidden Jew” in Poland during World War II and answers a festering question about her own past.

“I had always wondered what would have happened if the war had never ended,” says Dar, whose family lived as Catholics before emigrating to Israel in 1947. “I found out that fear can be inherited and transferred so that it becomes part of one’s life. But you can’t kill a spirit. If an idea is powerful, when the climate is right, it will surface. Judaism had been bastardized in Belmonte and the people had created a religion of their own, but the source of the spring was still there,” she says.

The project leading to Dar’s exhibition began two years ago, when she read a magazine article about the survival of the Belmonte Jews, who had been forcibly converted to Christianity in the late 15th Century. “I had been interested in the Inquisition for a long time, so the article triggered an alarm. I had to see for myself,” she says.

Dar contacted the author, Michael Fink, who put her in touch with Joshua Ruah, a urologist and Jewish spiritual leader in Lisbon who was also well acquainted with Belmonte. Ruah welcomed her inquiry and provided an introduction by inviting her to his daughter’s wedding, which would be attended by the Jews of Belmonte.

The introductions went well enough and the wedding was a marvelous means of immersing herself in Portuguese Jewish life, but when Dar subsequently made an eight-hour journey by train to Belmonte, on April 6, 1990, she found the people reticent.

The Jewish community is “the best-known secret in town,” she says, recalling a synagogue with an anonymous exterior and people who have retained their modest family homes for centuries by appearing to live as Christians. But eventually Elias Nunes, a Jewish leader, appeared, led her through the poor neighborhood where Jews live and invited her to Friday night services at the synagogue.

Dar returned home to Los Angeles with little more than warm memories and snapshots she had taken in Belmonte and Lisbon, but that was enough. As is her custom, she set about telling a story through art. Conceiving of her work as more like cinematography than printmaking or photography, she works out a “plot,” assembles images and objects as “props” and combines them in collage-like fashion on a copy machine.

Flowers, grown in her own garden and selected for their symbolic colors, often appear in her work. So do a prayer shawl and an enlarged image of the “life line” on the palm of her hand. The most treasured prop, however, is a tiny vest that Dar’s mother fashioned for her 3-year-old daughter from an embroidered wool pillow cover when the family was in hiding. All these images appear in the exhibition, along with pictures from Portugal.

The show begins with “Map of the Journey,” a four-part piece including images of Dar’s hand, foot and some seeds that symbolize her idea. “Joseph’s Coat of Fate,” one of the two largest works in the show, tells of Dar’s shadowy childhood by overlaying the woolen vest with pictures of her family and their false identity papers.

The other major work, “Belmonte,” mixes poignant images of the village with pastel flowers and black holes. “I have always shied away from black before, but this time I had to use it, to show the void,” Dar says.

“The Mystery of Rachel of Lisbon” and several other works are based on the Lisbon wedding, but they speak of Jewish ceremonies and family ties rather than a specific event. “The bride, Rachel Ruah, is a beautiful woman, but I made her shadowy, removed and historical. It’s her, but it’s also all the other Rachels before her,” Dar says.

Learning to manipulate a color copy machine for artful purposes is not as easy as it may sound, but Dar says the relative ease of her method is essential. “I am trained as a painter, but it would be impossible to paint all this, and to work through the painful emotional aspects. The technology allows me to work fast and to keep the ideas fresh,” she says.

“Loop of Fate” is among the last temporary shows to be staged at the museum before it moves to its new home, currently under construction in Sepulveda Pass. In museum Director Nancy Berman’s view, Dar’s show is a perfect finale.

“This exhibition makes a contribution to contemporary art, it conveys knowledge about a little known part of Jewish history, and it makes a personal statement--a statement of hope, believe it or not,” Berman says. “An artist’s statement doesn’t have to be hopeful to make us happy, but in this case it is.”