REACTIONS TO HORRORS AMD HOLOCAUST : Artworks underline personal impact of painful political experiences.

Joyce Dallal remembers looking at her Iraqi-born father as he watched the television coverage of the Persian Gulf War.

Her father, a Jew, fled the Arab country in 1949 after the Iraqi government executed her uncle for “subversive” activities. Despite her father’s bitterness toward the Iraqi government, the country was still his homeland.

“The television talked of Iraqi targets to bomb,” said Dallal, 36, a member of the art department faculty at El Camino College. “But it was much more complex than that. Those are homes for people, and they have memories there. They live and work there. That’s where personal stories happen.”

“He was deeply conflicted about the Persian Gulf War,” she added. “I felt it also.”

Dallal’s drive to resolve her feelings produced an artwork entitled “Family Album,” which tries to convey the complexity of her family’s reactions to the war. Her work is one of five pieces showcased in an exhibit entitled “Eye Witness” at El Camino College. The pieces, done by California-based artists, were shaped by major political events.

A reception for the show will take place from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. today at the El Camino College Art Gallery on campus. The gallery and reception are open to the public, and admission is free.

“A show like this has to do with man’s inhumanity to man,” Curator Susanna Meiers said. “Even though the subject matter is grim, I regard the work as really positive. The artwork translates painful experiences into a thing of beauty and stirs people not to do this kind of thing again.”

Dallal’s work is an installation piece, which invites viewers to sit in a chair while perusing two albums of photos and newspaper clippings about her family. One clipping carries a brief New York Times story about the execution of Dallal’s uncle.

Another work featured in the show is by Hideo Sakata, who as a 10-year-old was in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped. An abstract painting shows a brilliant light produced from the blast as seen through a crack in the wall.

A second Sakata painting portrays what appears to be couples embracing. But a closer look provides a startling realization, Meiers says.

“What in fact they are, are people saying goodby as the bomb is dropping,” Meiers said.

The showing also displays works by:

* George Csengeri , a Hungarian-born painter whose paintings illustrate the slaughter of Jews in Eastern Europe. Members of the artist’s immediate family perished in the Holocaust.

* See Lee, a Laotian, learned the tradition of Hmong tapestry, which uses techniques of applique and embroidery. Her tapestries poignantly depict the history of the Hmong people as they fled a refugee camp in Thailand in 1979.

* Said Abdel Sayed , a Christian born in predominantly Muslim Egypt, whose canvases deal with his flight from his homeland and the difficulty of adjusting to a new culture in America.

The exhibit runs through March 12, at the El Camino College Art Gallery on campus. Hours are 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday.

El Camino Community College is at 16007 Crenshaw Blvd. in Torrance. Information: (310) 532-3670, Ext. 4568.