A one-afternoon poetry exhibition on 24 October 2026
Nigerian-born, London-based poet Michelle Nnanyelugo presents Pink Onions, a poetry exhibition subtitled The Pickled Bodies of Dizzy Daughters, at The Rotunda Theatre, Beckton Globe Library, on Saturday 24 October 2026, from 1:30pm to 4:30pm. The exhibition explores the layered mishmash of girlhood and womanhood: its abrupt transitions, its contradictions, its pain and its peculiar demands.
Pink Onions treats poetry as something to be entered as well as heard. Its visual world, a stack of retro computer monitors, each screen showing a woman cooking, cleaning, ironing or serving, sets the terms: the daughter as a figure on display, endlessly playing back the labour expected of her. Under the exhibition’s three-word motto, Morsels. Ruffles. Abattoir., the work moves from the small and sweet, through the decorative, to the place where bodies are cut and priced. It asks what it means to be preserved, presented and consumed, and what a woman keeps of herself when she has been pickled in other people’s expectations.
The title holds the tension at the heart of the work. An onion is ordinary kitchen matter, built in layers, that makes people cry; pickled and turned pink, it becomes something else entirely, softened, coloured and kept. The exhibition continues Nnanyelugo’s long engagement with the body as a site of pain, display and survival, bringing together performance, text and image in an afternoon that is part reading, part installation and part conversation.
“[Quote from Michelle Nnanyelugo on what the exhibition means to her and what she hopes audiences take away.]”
About Michelle Nnanyelugo
Michelle Chiamaka Nnanyelugo is a poet and spoken word performer. She began writing seriously at home in Nkwelle, outside Onitsha, after graduating in 2017, and found her stage with the Enugu Literary Society during national service. In 2019 she was second runner-up in the Poets in Nigeria poetry grand slam in Anambra. She moved to the UK in 2020 and holds an MA in Media and Creative Cultures from the University of Greenwich. Her poem “My Body Cannot Keep Secrets” was published in Libretto and forms part of her chapbook-in-progress, Phoenix. Her work returns often to the body, drawing on her own experience of chronic pain and sleeplessness.
Event details
What: Pink Onions: The Pickled Bodies of Dizzy Daughters, a poetry exhibition by Michelle Nnanyelugo
When: Saturday 24 October 2026, 1:30pm–4:30pm
Where: The Rotunda Theatre, Beckton Globe Library, 1 Kingsford Way, London E6 5JQ
Tickets: [Price] · Book at bit.ly/PinkOnions
Accessibility: [Step-free access, BSL, etc.]
