As darkness falls on Luxembourg City this November, the heartbeat of its contemporary art scene begins to thrum from an unexpected source. Not from the dark halls of nightclubs, but from the cavernous halls of Casino Luxembourg. Here, the opening of Luxembourg Art Week 2025 is being rewritten as an experiment in rhythm, sweat and raw emotion.

Casino’s event, titled Athletes of the Heart, takes its name from a phrase coined by the French visionary Antonin Artaud, who imagined actors as “athletes” of emotion, performers who train the body and the soul alike. It’s a fitting metaphor for what unfolds at Casino Luxembourg: a night where performance, sound and movement merge into something visceral and immediate.

For Kevin Muhlen, director of Casino Luxembourg since 2016, this evening marks more than a festive kickoff. “We’ve been hosting Luxembourg Art Week opening since 2018,” he explains, “always with the idea of creating a big, festive moment, but one that stays connected to artistic creation. We wanted to avoid losing the DNA of Casino to too much partying and not enough artistic impact.”

This balancing act, between art and energy, reflection and release, has become Casino’s hallmark contribution to the city’s most important art event. In a fair dominated by sales and collectors, Casino offers a counterpoint: a non-commercial space of experimentation, inclusion, and freedom.

“Last year’s event was called Hardcore Freedom,” Muhlen recalls with a smile. This year, with Athletes of the Heart, Casino wanted to go deeper, to connect to something more primal, more emotional, more physical.

Cruelty, Catharsis, and Club Culture

The title also ties directly to and is inspired by Theatre of Cruelty, an exhibition opening at Casino the following week, curated by Agnes Gryczkowska. With Artaud’s writings and drawings taking centre stage, the group show explores how art can process collective trauma through raw, confrontational forms.

“We took this as a starting point to reflect on what we could do for Luxembourg Art Week,” Muhlen says. “We wanted to take it out of the exhibition context and project it into the performative space, this being the root of Antonin Artaud’s practice and thought.”

To curate this hybrid format, Casino joined forces with Agnes Gryczkowska and galR, a cross-European collective rooted in Luxembourg’s clubbing scene but expanding into architecture, art, and social space. “They’re friends and collaborators,” Muhlen says, describing them as like-minded people who understand how to bridge artistic experimentation with nightlife energy.

The result is a programme that reads like a manifesto: an endurance test of body, heart and frequency. British performer Blackhaine, known for his punishing, blood-slicked performances and collaborations with global rap icons, brings the night’s most physical charge. “He embodies everything Artaud wrote about,” says Muhlen. “He has this very raw energy, with something like a street aesthetic. It is very profound in terms of physical and conceptual intensity.” 

In counterpoint, Ukrainian composer and producer Katarina Gryvul offers a hauntingly emotional live set, a symbiosis of classical composition and avant-garde electronics. “We wanted something that would balance the intensity of Blackhaine,” says Muhlen. “Her performance connects on another level, deeply emotional, beautifully experimental.”

The programme unfolds like a fever dream: performances by Berlin-based media artist Maxim Tur, accompanied by urge2bite; a debut collaboration Nexus by B4MBA & MOOKI6 of Barcelona’s Jokkoo Collective; and a DJ set by iced lattina, whose unpredictability turns dance music into a field of emotional experiment.

Emerging Energy, Unfiltered Voices

At the heart of the evening is the sense of emergence, of new artists and new forms bubbling up through the cracks of established scenes. “Maxim Tur just finished his studies in Berlin,” says Muhlen. 

That inclusive ethos runs deep in Casino Luxembourg’s mission. “We’re a non-profit art space,” Muhlen notes. “Entrance is free. You don’t need a background in art or any particular education. It’s really an open platform for discovery.”

Such openness contrasts with the commercial atmosphere of Luxembourg Art Week fair itself. “Our approach is to balance out the fair’s market aspect,” he says. “To highlight non-commercial moments, where creation and experimentation are the focus.” In short, it’s about showing that art can be experienced through the body, through collective energy, through fun.

And fun, in Muhlen’s eyes, is not the enemy of depth. “Fun plays a role in allowing people to let go, to not feel restrained in some intellectual capsule of an exhibition. Athletes of the Heart is about experiencing art in the most primal way – through your senses and your body.”

The Night as Artwork

What Casino offers, then, is not just a party or performance, but an experience, one that blurs the lines between institution and underground, between discipline and instinct.

“Performance today is no longer a side event,” Muhlen observes. “It’s not something that fills a gap in an opening programme. It has its own structure, its own concept, its own presence. And it’s increasingly hybrid, it mixes with music, fashion, club culture, and everyday life. These crossings are what make a society lively and curious.”

In that sense, Athletes of the Heart feels like a statement about the times we live in, and the kind of art that responds to them. The performances are not polite diversions; they are encounters. They remind us that art can still be urgent, sweaty, unguarded, and that the pulse of a city’s art scene might just be felt most strongly in the middle of the night.

As Muhlen puts it, “We need spaces of freedom. Spaces of gathering. Spaces where curiosity and criticality meet joy. That’s what Athletes of the Heart is, a one-off moment in the year, something you wouldn’t experience anywhere else in Luxembourg.”

So, as the city’s collectors, curators and creatives spill from the fair into Casino’s dimly lit halls, they’re not just witnessing art, they’re entering its bloodstream.

And for one night, the heart of Luxembourg’s art scene doesn’t hang on a wall. It beats.

Check out Athletes of the Heart on Friday 21 November, from 21:00-2:00. Entrance is free of charge. More information: casino-luxembourg.lu