I do this ritual every morning 
when I enter the studio, every morning
And then I do this, all of this, and to do
this good luck as I told you and because
this one belongs to my wife, I always
kiss this and I kiss her socks like this
Yeah I'm pretty superstitious
I know it's stupid
I mean it's you know all the time is 
because you try to keep control of things
In a way I'm a control freak, I'm a control freak
I moved to Sofia when I got married
which was in autumn of 85 and since that
time, my studios they were here and in a
way, Sophia is part of my life
Yeah this was my - you see,
the big window, the right-hand one, 
this was our mural painting studio
Let me call the dean to give us the
permission to enter inside
And this is absolutely 
the same as it was in early 70s
I entered here in 75 and I
graduated in 81
This is the mural painting studio
And this is me,
look at me as you see it yeah it is the
same floor and my hair is almost the
same
I mean it was a very conservative education
But I still use, from my old
professor Mito Mito Ganovski,
a saying, which was something like this:
'You, as an artist, it doesn't matter when you
enter an architecture, even if they built
architecture especially for your work of
art, you're always the second first this
architecture as soon as you obey that
rule there are no problems,
at least for me
My most famous or infamous piece is
called 'Top Secret' [1989-90]
In this piece,
I was telling the story, a very personal story,
which was like a real burden for me for
a for a long time.
When I was in third year of the
Academy, I was recruited by the Secret
Service in Bulgaria.
It was mainly
kind of really talking about my fellow
students. What kind of artists are they?
Are there good artists? They don't have
contacts with religious sects and
so and so
And I was telling them very obediently
and I felt I was something like
the Bulgarian version of James Bond
But in 83, I said: please, no, I don't really
want to be used anymore please
I still believed in socialism but then, step by step
thanks to Perestroika time, which started
in the summer of 85, I started kind of
realising in what I'm living in
And I made at least two paintings which were dedicated that story
You see me with with the silhouettes, supposedly
the Secret Service, holding this man down there
And there is a little bit of a
hope, this kind of a slightly brightened
future but this one is still really
really, really black
You have this burden,
you try to take out that burden and
make at least these two paintings then
you do this piece 'Top Secret' and it's a
kind of a unique situation
There is no such a dumb person who without being
threatened to be disclosed
[would] just reveal this
But, as soon as they done
this, I had the feeling that there are no
barriers anymore in front of me, that I
could do whatever I want
View to the West became a sort of a legend,
in a way, in contemporary Bulgarian art
It was done during an exhibition
called the 'Earth and Sky', which happened
on the roof terrace of the official
union artists
So my work was consisting of this
telescope, which was mounted on something
So here is the parapet
Here there was a nice bronze plate; 
label written 'View to the West'
and then you you do that and
then you look at and you see really the
big red ruby star very beautiful, by the
way, and this is exactly the West from
the Eastern block. Before, looking to the
West that means you look into the
capitalism, the desirable paradise or
whatever but then -  okay you're looking to
the West, this West becomes closer but
what actually becomes closer and you get
even more attracted by, like swallowed by,
is the red star
It took some time,
when I kind of convinced the art world
that all of this visual diversity is
done by one person and it is by one
person because there is a common
attitude behind that
And now when people
ask me what I'm doing I say usually:
'I'm telling stories in space'
Can you read it?
[Cameraman]: It's very small
[Complaining that it's too small]
Usually we think that the white cube is
something which is ideal, it's perfect
perfect place to exhibit two or three
dimensional artworks but when you come
closer you realise that actually it's
not perfect, you have little cracks, you
have little bubbles which they could
become like a really nice valleys or
little hills that my little fellows
could live there
I'm really using that
principle which I learned back in my murals 
and this is also a mural
I'm using the space
[A LIfe (Black & White) 1998 - ongoing]
The idea comes from 98. You
have two painters: one is with white paint,
the other one with black paint
and these two painters, they're following
each other so all the time, half of the
space should be black, half of the space
should be white
I think the title
explains quite a lot, it says:
'A Life (Black & White)', so the things become like real life. The black,
presumably, the bad things they cover the
white, the good things and vice versa
And you realise that it's real absurd what
you are doing but you keep doing it
Just what we do, all of us, living on that
place called Earth
