Zaina Benhamou  is a contemporary Artist . She has a background in Jewellery Design, Corsetry and Pattern drawing. But before she was an Artist, she was an Athlete. She trained in a top-level gymnastics program and became Flemish champion at the age of eight. That experience has always stayed with her and  shapes the way she looks at the world we live in today.

Elite gymnastics is, for her, a severe teacher: excellence at the expense of oneself. It takes a toll on both mind and body, and she could not stay in an environment where growth was not allowed to happen naturally. At the same time, it taught her that the body is fundamental — first in sport and later in jewellery.

As athletes and as jewellery makers, people often talk about the body, but she keeps asking herself: What body?
As a young gymnast, she dreamed of going to the Olympics. At one point, she was close to that, but her environment decided otherwise: “A girl shouldn’t do professional sport, it is too expensive.”
It marked the end of her life as she knew it and the beginning of a new one. Craftmaking and visual arts became her new passion, and the body once again became her motivation.

She started working with her — quite literal — muscle memory to show what the body of a gymnast truly represents: the intense effort and hard labor that elite sport demands, both physically and mentally. She immersed herself in the strict movement patterns of flips, spins and controlled sequences — counting them, drawing them, sewing them, and transforming them into her own typographical language.

When she discovered that between 1902 and 1948 visual art was part of the Olympic Games, everything fell into place. This became a core inspiration for her artistic practice.
If art competitions were still part of the Olympics today, she would do everything in her power to compete.

‘Going for Gold’ is the mindset that brings these elements together: movement, tension, bodily memory, and the line between ambition and overexertion. The work shows what elite sport demands — and how that history continues to shape her way of making.