Nocturnal Wonderland: Museums at Night and LightNight

Both Manchester and Liverpool are heartily participating in this year's nationwide Museums at Night celebrations. Launching a weekend of events with a special one night show at Manchester Museum on 16 May, leading British sculptor and artist Richard Wentworth will be delving into the diverse and intricate peculiarities of objects amassed by local amateur collectors before gathering them all into a specially curated 'cabinet of curiosity' – but the real place to be on 17 May is Liverpool, set to be illuminated by an inspired programme of events for LightNight, this year given the theme of Memory and Identity.

At the Albert Dock, work by this year's shortlisted Liverpool Art Prize competitors Kevin Hunt (our April issue Showcase artist), Tabitha Moses, Juliann O'Malley and Laurence Payot will be on display til late, and accompanied by live music (4-8pm, Grand Hall, The Colonnades). Potter a couple of minutes down the cobbles, and you'll find yourself at The Art of Parties, as Tate Liverpool celebrates 25 years of exhibitions with music, performances, party games, quizzes, an anniversary retrospective in the Wolfson Gallery and, in an ode to the venue's current show Glam! The Performance of Style, you'll also encounter pampering sessions from make-up and beauty parlour So Coco Rouge (6-9pm).

Liverpool's biennial photography festival, LOOK/13, is well represented. Highlights include Sander/Weegee: Selections from the Side Photographic Collection – a collection of startling portraits recording 1920s and 30s German society by August Sander and Arthur 'Weegee' Fellig – at the Bluecoat (4-11pm), and a return of former contemporary gallery and artist studios Wolstenholme Creative Space as creative producers and curators with an exhibition at Drop the Dumbells. Liverpool, Unfinished is an evocative and emotive series of coloured portraits and landscapes by photographer Rob Bremner, whose defined works documenting people and everyday life in the mid-80s were shot in Everton Valley and across the city as part of a never completed student portfolio (4-10pm).

The Baltic Creative campus on Jamaica Street is full of open studios, events and workshops from 6-11pm, while at the Arena Studios and Gallery on Parliament Street, Paul Bywater presents 30 new, striking and highly detailed drawings in Something to do with Death. Focusing on portraiture and traditional forms of depiction, the artist will also be present to answer visitors' questions (6-9pm).

Camp and Furnace hosts Recurring, an exhibition and live performance (6-10pm) from the Not Just Collective, who will be examining and exploring the notions of dreams, consciousness, imagination, manifested rituals and relationships in the various contexts of drawing, art, sculpture, performance and audio intervention. Direct participation from members of the public will be encouraged as part of an ongoing piece that will be developed throughout the evening.

LightNight crescendoes with Memory Lame at Static Gallery (8pm-2am), combining a fun old social gathering and bouncing sound system courtesy of online arts magazine The Double Negative and experimental music agency Deep Hedonia. Provided, among other things, will be an interactive installation with 'reinterpreted karaoke,' favourite memories, music, and short party-inspired films from local, national and international filmmakers. Keeping the shenanigans running into the early hours will be a raft of specially selected DJs playing anything and everything from R‘n’B to Juan Atkins.

To make life easier on those weary limbs, you can hop on a free LightNight bus, which run every 30 minutes from 5.23pm and every 10 minutes from 8.10pm, looping from Pier Head past the Albert Dock, round to the Anglican Cathedral, then up to Lime Street station before returning to its starting point via Dale Street. So whether you fancy checking out Black Sun Horizon at The Royal Standard or Transition of a Memory at The Black-E, you really have no excuse, OK? OK, good.