Max HeyraudAfter backing student-led protests and leaving its home at Petrovaradin Fortress, EXIT will return in 2027 following a landmark election result, reaffirming the role of electronic music as a force for political expression.
EXIT Festival is heading home. After a year spent taking its programme across the world, the Serbian institution will return to Petrovaradin Fortress in July 2027, following an election victory for a student-backed movement that challenged more than a decade of dominance by Aleksandar Vučić’s ruling party.
Founded in 2000 as a student movement campaigning for democracy and peace, EXIT has spent more than two decades building a global reputation while retaining its connection to the political circumstances that shaped its beginnings.
EXIT left Serbia after publicly supporting student-led protests demanding accountability following the deadly Novi Sad railway station collapse. The festival cited political, security and financial pressures surrounding its position, making its absence from Petrovaradin Fortress a stark reminder of how cultural institutions can become entangled in wider struggles over freedom of expression.
“We always said that EXIT would return when freedom returned to our country,” the festival said in its announcement, crediting Serbian students with the determination that helped bring it back to the Fortress.
Its decision to stand alongside the student movement, despite the consequences for its own operations, places EXIT within a longer history of festivals and underground music communities using cultural platforms to articulate political dissent.
