Abstract
This article explores the ways in which the South African conceptual artists Willem Boshoff in 32 000 Darling Little Nuisances and Jan van der Merwe in Wag [Waiting] address complexities of Afrikaner identity informed by unequal power relations during the colonial era of the country. Both the installations take the Anglo-Boer War [Second Freedom War] (1899-1902) as central point of departure. The theoretical framework for the reading and interpretation of the chosen installations is postcolonial critique on the ways in which colonialism and nationalism informed and influenced the displacement, search and repositioning of identity as portrayed in the selected art installations. We argue that Van der Merwe and Boshoff deal with their personal, collective, and historical identity issues in the chosen conceptual art installations through artistic representations of their subjective selves. Inherently, these representations are informed by their individual as well as collective and historical memories of the past.