“Why it’s Time for Imperial, Again”. Again. This early video work by Gerard Byrne is shown in a collaboration between the organization Itinerant – which presents occasional exhibitions in New York spaces that have become vacant due to the economic downturn – and Protocinema, a transnational experiment creating nomadic exhibitions in New York and Istanbul. Curators Rose Lord and Mari Spirito stress the renewed urgency of Byrne’s piece, which was made between 1998 and 2002 and which recalls a period of US history from the early 1980s. In the work, two actors humorously re-enact a dialogue between former Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca and Frank Sinatra. The dialogue betwen Iacocca and Sinatra was originally published in an elaborate advertisement for the new Chrysler Imperial in the November 1980 issue of National Geographic. In the aftermath of the US presidential elections, at a time when there is much discussion on the life and death of the US auto industry and, to be sure, of the very nature of capitalism, Lord and Spirito believe the work might help us reflect on the decline and alienation within contemporary America. In this work, the real is fictionalized and the fictional realized, showing us, as Amanda Coulson writes in a 2004 review of the work in Frieze, the construction of reality and myth in the media.