In late 2025, I applied for the Dietrich von Bothmer Research Scholar position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art despite having no formal qualifications. I was obviously rejected for the job, yet I have nevertheless undertaken the position in a ‘shadow’ capacity, approaching the role as a conceptual art project in itself. By stepping into this space, I experiment with what it means to inhabit the authority and practices of scholarship while embracing the role of artist with an outsider status.

The project therefore becomes both research and performance, questioning the boundaries between expertise, interpretation, and creative intervention through two-dimensional works and the aesthetic rhetoric of research ephemera. Below begins the scroll preserving the documents pertaining to this project.      

-Timothy Hull