We show that the five-dimensional Maxwell theory with the Chern-Simons term is tachyonic in the presence of a constant electric field. When coupled to gravity, a sufficiently large Chern-Simons coupling causes instability of the Reissner-Nordstrom black holes in anti-de Sitter space. The instability happens only at non-vanishing momenta, suggesting a spatially modulated phase in the holographically dual quantum field theory in 3+1 dimensions, with spontaneous current generation in a helical configuration. The three-charge extremal black hole in the type IIB superstring theory on AdS_5 x S^5 barely satisfies the stability condition.

29 pages, 6 figures v2: references added