Art at Cassia
Cassia was designed from the outset as a home for contemporary Israeli art. The works you'll encounter here — in the lobby, the corridors, the dining room, and the rooms themselves — are not decorative. They were commissioned, curated, and placed with intention, many created specifically for this building and this city. The collection is overseen by Irena Gordon, Collection Curator.
Jerusalem has always been a place where history is made, contested, and reimagined. The artists in Cassia's collection engage with that complexity directly — through painting, sculpture, video, textile, ceramics, print, and installation — offering guests not just something to look at, but something to think about. Every work in the collection reflects a specific relationship between art and place.
The Guestrooms
Shay Zilberman's collages occupy every room in the hotel and the corridors between them. Working from anonymous photo albums, travel guides, and illustrated books from the latter decades of the 20th century, he performs surgical acts of cutting and reassembly — combining archival images with drawings in ink, graphite, and scratching to produce compositions that feel at once familiar and displaced, logical and surreal. Printed at a scale that exposes the manual processes behind them, the works turn each guestroom into a quiet space for looking.
Public Spaces
The lobby brings together some of the most substantial works in the collection. Meydad Eliahu's monumental wall piece — painted partly from direct observation of hotel workers and guests — maps the crossroads on which the hotel stands. Jan Tichy's two-channel light installation traces the building's original architectural drawings in projected light. Peter Maltz'
Pilgrimage the the Center of the Earth composed of multiple casts created during a walk from the hotel to the Wailing Wall in the Old City. Dvora Morag's suspended glass vessels sound two possible notes: bells or breakage. Esther Schneider's column-spanning textiles weave avant-garde abstraction and Jewish ceremonial tradition into a single structure. Together these works turn the lobby into something closer to an encounter than an arrival.
Community & Educaton
In 2019, Cassia collaborated with the Department of Ceramics and Glass Design at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design on a semester-long research project. Students were asked to design a tea and coffee set for use in the hotel — an object that would carry their personal experience of Jerusalem while enriching the guest experience with an additional aesthetic layer. Eleven distinct projects emerged. They are exhibited in the hotel's public spaces as part of the ongoing Tea Party exhibition, curated by Irena Gordon and lecturer Einav Barness Eliasov.