After Luxembourg Art Week’s late-night opening, continue the experience at Casino Luxembourg — Forum d'art contemporain with an opening night dedicated to performance and music.
Under the title Athletes of the Heart — borrowed from Antonin Artaud — this edition brings together artists for whom the stage is a space of endurance and vital expenditure. Here, performance becomes a physical, emotional, and sonic ordeal: a pursuit of tension and transcendence where the heart, rather than form, drives the experience.
These “athletes” do not merely perform; they put their breath, fragility, and intensity at stake, transforming the night into a shared ground of rhythm and resistance.
Curated by Agnes Gryczkowska, galR, and Kevin Muhlen, the evening presents a new and daring program in which performance — both experimental and powerful — merges with an emotional and raw musical experience.
Biographies
Blackhaine
Blackhaine is a British contemporary artist whose radical approach to drill and noise music, as well as performance, extends into choreography and immersive audiovisual installation. He also directs the artistic direction and scenography for internationally renowned rappers. Born out of the frozen climate of anxiety that marked 2020, Blackhaine’s multimedia work translates a transition—from visceral, paralyzing fear to a form of grueling, chaotic ecstasy.
Deeply influenced by the life and culture of Northern England, which have profoundly shaped his political outlook, his hybrid dramaturgy merges voice, movement, and scenography in an approach inspired by the “Theatre of Cruelty.” Driven by a pursuit of nihilism as a form of honesty, Blackhaine’s physical performances—known to leave him bruised and bloodied—rely on techniques of endurance and tension within recomposed forms that are both intimate and confrontational, disrupting established genres. Performed live, each act differs from the last, yet all share a constant conviction: to experiment with ever-changing forms at the crossroads of noise, punk, ambient, experimental dance, and poetry.
Katarina Gryvul
Katarina Gryvul is a composer, violinist, music producer, and trained educator. After studying at the conservatory, she shifted her practice toward electronic music, blending her classical background with avant-garde sounds to develop a unique sonic identity. Gryvul places great importance on timbre in her compositions, fusing her classical roots with sound design. She often uses live electronics for instruments and voice, analog synthesizers, and spatial audio to create immersive soundscapes.
B4MBA & MOOKI6 present Nexus (live)
As fresh as a vinyl still in its shrink wrap, Nexus is a brand-new collaboration between Senegalese-Spanish producer, DJ, and singer B4MBA, and French-Guadeloupean audiovisual artist MOOKI6, both members of the Barcelona-based collective Jokkoo. Founded in 2017, Jokkoo aims to infuse the city’s club scene with experimental Pan-African rhythms and contemporary diasporic sounds. With Nexus, the duo pushes this approach even further, blurring the boundaries between dancehall and trap while incorporating industrial noise, metal, and dark atmospheres.
iced lattina (DJ)
If emotional music were a genre in itself, it would perfectly describe iced lattina’s style. Whether it’s confidence, anger, apathy, or excitement, her sets are always grounded in saturated basslines and raw club sounds. Unconcerned with tempo yet meticulous in selection, iced lattina embodies unpredictability in its purest form.
Maxim Tur (performance)
Born in 1996 in Leninskoe (Kyrgyzstan) and a graduate of the Berlin University of the Arts, Maxim Tur is a Berlin-based artist whose work draws from pop culture, internet phenomena, and video games. His practice explores philosophical and media-related questions through installations, sculptures, videos, and performances. For the Luxembourg Art Week opening night, he will perform alongside Miran Thiemann, alias urge2bite, a singer and electronic music producer from Leipzig, now based in Berlin.
galR
galR is a European production platform exploring spatiality through avant-club tendencies in sound, art, and community practices. Supported by the team of a seminar held at the Berlin University of the Arts, the label centers around its upcoming research base hqLX—an off-space in Luxembourg City dedicated to encounter and experimentation, co-programmed among others with Casino Luxembourg. For this presentation, galR is joined by Transatlantic, a Berlin-based multidisciplinary label and agency focused on contemporary music. The label prioritizes friendship and collaboration over strict genre definitions.
