Artist Stalk #3 with Mihai Plătică
(Artist Stalk)

moderated by Andreea Samoilă
7 October 2025, 6:00 PM

Sometimes, the most interesting conversations with artists don’t start with their work, but with much simpler things: what made them pause recently, what they can’t stop thinking about, what they noticed on a day when they weren’t looking for anything in particular. At Artist Stalk, that’s exactly where we like to stay – in the unplanned zone of the conversation. An Artist Stalk is a conversation about anything but one’s own practice, which opens up another perspective on the things around us and brings us closer to the person who is the artist, rather than to the status of being an artist.

Mihai Plătică (b. 1983, Brașov) is an artist who lives and works in Cluj-Napoca. Trained at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, after a period dedicated to professional sports, his artistic practice explores the relationship between object, image, and context, investigating through photography and sculpture the physical principles that govern the natural world. His works are distinguished by a structured and analytical working method, in which scientific observation intertwines with aesthetic sensitivity.

Mihai Plătică has held solo exhibitions at Gaep (2024, 2021), Baril (Centrul de Interes 2019, Fabrica de Pensule 2016). His works have also been presented in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Praha (Czech Republic), Kotsanas Museum Heraklion (Greece), Occupy Art Festival, New York (USA), as well as in Romania at Zina Project Space (Cluj-Napoca), Brașov Art Museum, Cluj Art Museum, or Baia Turcească Iași, among others.

Artist Stalk is a concept developed by Indecis artist run (Timișoara) and adopted by Contemporar in Cluj.

For the inaugural edition of Artist Stalk Cluj (September–October 2025), three artists from the local scene are invited to join the conversation. Each artist also proposes a single work installed in the gallery space, that acts as a key reference: a work that has marked them, shaped their artistic sensibility, or shifted their perspective in a lasting way.

The work suggested by Mihai Plătică in connection with his Artist Stalk was Thomas Demand’s Pacific Sun. This video, created by constructing and animating a full-scale paper model, was inspired by real-life security camera footage capturing chaotic scenes inside a cruise ship, caught in a storm in the South Pacific. Known for building and photographing realistic, life-sized models of existing environments, Demand explores, in this work, the boundaries between reality and representation by meticulously reconstructing the scene seen on YouTube using papier-mâché models.

Despite our efforts to secure the rights to present Thomas Demand’s video, time constraints and technical limitations made it impossible to screen Pacific Sun itself. What began as a light-hearted suggestion for a compromise eventually turned out to be a fitting decision: to show the original YouTube video that had inspired Demand’s work. This gesture tries to remain faithful to Mihai Plătică’s choice, while also merging two layers of reference — the absence of Demand’s work acknowledged through the source that first inspired it.