curated by is Vienna's annual gallery festival with international curators, organized by treat.agency. Each autumn, 24 Vienna galleries invite an international curator to respond to a shared theme with an exhibition. treat.agency runs the festival from the open call to the final accounting: organization, funding, website, campaign, press and content.
treat.agency has worked for curated by since 2021, first for website and social media, and has run the whole festival since 2022. We work with the festival association, its board of gallerists and the festival director Attilia Fattori Franchini, who led the 2025 and 2026 editions together with Christina Linher. We run the annual cycle end to end: the open call and the gallery selection, the vote on the theme, the curator announcements, the opening weekend with festival headquarters, tours and events, the delivery and logistics for all 24 galleries, and the evaluation after the festival. The festival has attracted more than 60,000 visitors regularly.
Funding is part of that job. Every year we prepare and submit the funding applications to the City of Vienna (Stadt Wien Kultur, MA 7) and to the Austrian federal ministry for arts and culture (BMKÖS, today BMWKMS), with project descriptions, budgets and cost calculations for both the festival association and treat xD GmbH. After the festival we deliver the accounting: project reports, income and expenditure statements, the receipts of all 24 galleries collected through the gallery dashboard, fair pay data and visitor statistics. The city, the board and the sponsors receive a recap with the festival's key figures.
The last three editions: Untold Narratives (2024) with a symposium on artists' estates at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Fragmented Subjectivity (2025) with the first artist- and curator-led tours, and LOVE (2026) with mumok as the first institutional festival HQ.
curatedby.at is the festival's digital hub, designed, built and run by treat.agency. It carries the full programme: galleries and curators, the opening weekend schedule, a map of all locations, the annual essay, the podcast and bookable tours. The archive holds every edition since 2009 with all curators, galleries and artists, searchable by year, gallery, curator and artist.
Behind the login, the galleries have their own dashboard. There they upload press images, exhibition documentation and invoices, report their visitor numbers and keep their data up to date for the accounting. Each year the site takes on the edition's key visual, in 2026 with an animated LOVE opener. In 2024 the site counted 27,000 visitors, 40 percent from Austria, 15 percent from France and 10 percent each from the US and Germany.
treat.agency runs the festival's Instagram, Facebook and TikTok accounts, with content from the announcement of the galleries in spring to the finissage in October and a paid campaign from May to October. The formats: exhibition carousels with the press images of all 24 galleries, the story series "curious about" with the invited curators (2024, 2025 and 2026), programme posts for the weekly tours, media partner posts, teaser reels for every exhibition and podcast episode, and collab posts with partners such as mumok.
Since 2021 treat.agency has produced more than 1,200 social assets for curated by, and the campaign has achieved a reach of over 3.5 million. In 2024 alone, postings and stories reached 2.5 million accounts, the reels 350,000. For 2025 we produced 24 teaser videos, 13 podcast teasers and more than 70 further assets.
Every edition gets its own key visual (2024 designed soju.studio, 2025 and 2026 by Leonard Siegwardt), which treat.agency rolls out across all channels: Gewista culture posters and City Lights on the Ring (24 City Lights in 2025), Telelights, posters, flyers (2,400 copies in 2025), the festival booklet with map and address list (3,000 copies), programme cards and bags, ads in the Gallery Guide and The Gap, online banners and newsletters in German and English.
We coordinate the media partnerships, eight in 2026 (Mousse, Texte zur Kunst, Monopol, PARNASS, Kunstforum, Arts of the Working Class, Collectors Agenda and émergent magazine), the sponsor packages and partners (in 2026 Wiener Städtische, Universität Wien, Parallel, Phileas, Trumer, Siegfried Resch, Saint Charles, Taxi 40100, Vöslauer and WienTourismus) and, together with the festival direction, the press work: press releases in German and English, the press kit with the essay, the press conference at mumok and the international press trip. 2024 ended with more than 30 clippings. In 2025 the festival was covered by Artforum, Frieze, e-flux, Monopol, Tagesspiegel, Der Standard, Kurier, Falter and Die Presse.
The curated by podcast started in July 2024. treat.agency produces it from recording and editing to cover art, descriptions and teaser reels, and publishes it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and curatedby.at. 34 episodes so far: in 2024 conversations with the curators plus nine Expert Talks from the symposium on artists' estates, in 2025 thirteen episodes with the invited curators, in 2026 a series of three episodes on LOVE, with gallerists across generations, the essayist Ariana Reines in conversation with Fatima Hellberg, and the curators Kathrin Bentele, Kristian Vistrup Madsen and Vanessa Joan Müller.
Video runs alongside: 24 exhibition videos and filmed curator tours in 2025, teaser reels for every exhibition and every episode and the stories in 2026, and recorded curator tours that galleries can book. In total, treat.agency has produced more than 100 video clips for curated by. Since 2025 the festival cooperates with Contemporary Art Daily; in 2026 treat.agency coordinated the photographic documentation of all 25 exhibitions with two photographers for it.
— Full organisation, website and advertising since 2022
— 1M+ digital visitors
— 24 galleries, 40+ Curators
