Ibrahim Mahama

On 12 June 2026, MAPS unveils a new monumental work on the museum’s forecourt: Labyrinths by Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama, who currently holds the number one spot on ArtReview’s international Power 100 list.

The work is created from reclaimed bricks sourced from some of Denmark’s historically and culturally significant buildings: Fredensborg Castle, Our Lady’s Abbey, Vestre Prison, the Natural History Museum of Denmark, and MAPS’ own building, formerly a school in Køge.

The bricks have been part of places shaped by power, faith, law, learning and knowledge. Now they are brought together in a new public artwork. Not as ruins. Not as nostalgia. But as material for imagining forward.

With Labyrinths, Ibrahim Mahama transforms MAPS’ forecourt into a space of passage, encounter and reflection. A transitional space between museum and city. Between past and future. Between the local and the global. And between the stories we inherit and the hopes we pass on to future generations.

Mahama is internationally recognised for his large-scale installations in which used materials are given new life: jute sacks, shoeshine boxes, blackboards, railway tracks, train carriages and other everyday objects. In his works, materials always carry stories — of global trade, labour, colonial connections, circulation, wear, and human movement across the world.

As part of the project, MAPS has invited more than one thousand children and young people from Køge Municipality into Mahama’s artistic universe. Through workshops, the students reflected on what objects can remember, what matters to them personally, and left tangible traces in the bricks, inscribing themselves into the work’s larger narrative of community, memory and future.

Labyrinths is the first work in MAPS’ new programme series Tomorrow’s Public Art, through which the museum annually invites international artists to create new site-specific works in Køge. With the series, MAPS explores what public art can be today, and how public space can become a place where new futures are imagined, shared and tested.

Tomorrow’s Public Art is supported by
The Augustinus Foundation, The New Carlsberg Foundation, The Danish Arts Foundation, The North Jutland Foundation, and The Aage and Johanne Louis-Hansen Foundation.

Ibrahim Mahama, Labyrinths, 2026. Courtesy of the Artist, MAPS – Museum of Art in Public Space, APALAZZOGALLERY and White Cube. Labyrinths is commissioned by MAPS – Museum of Art in Public Space, Denmark. Development and Production by KWY.studio.